


A Marriage of True Minds

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [29]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Cable and Deadpool, Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Christmas, Legal Drama, Multi, because sonnets, motion practice universe, the wedding story, with egregious overuse of certain sonnets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:18:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2799278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is not love which alters when it alteration find or bends with the remover to remove.</p><p>Or, to put it another way:  after a year and a half of cases, conflicts, happiness, and hope, Phil and Clint finally tie the knot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place primarily after “Chain of Custody,” although a few scenes take place prior to that. As such, there are a couple references to “Chain of Custody,” but nothing super spoilery.
> 
> Thanks as always to my beta-readers, who are sometimes reminded that this wedding was supposed to take place (or at least be implied) at the end of the original story in this series. Instead, Jen and saranoh have suffered through 28 other fics to finally reach this point. But then again, dear reader, so have you.

Clint steeples his fingers on the table and tries, hard as he can, to hold his face neutral as possible. He’d practiced all his blankest expressions in the bathroom a half hour ago, rotating through resting-face neutral and _Phil tells another boring story about vintage comic books_ neutral before settling on his favorite (and the most unreadable expression of all): courtroom neutral.

Across from him, his closest friends in the world—well, minus the one who’s babysitting his boyfriend’s kid tonight—watch him carefully, their eyes narrowed and their lips pursed.

They wait. Probably impatiently, knowing the two of them. He even thinks he hears a toe tapping. Which is why, like an asshole, he picks up his wine glass.

Helps himself to a slow sip.

Settles the glass back down on the table.

Clears his throat.

“I suppose,” he finally begins, dragging out the words like something out of a bad PBS drama, “you’re wondering why I called you all—”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Cut the crap, Clint,” she snaps, and he scowls across the table at her. “There’s only two of us, and I go to trial on a domestic battery case first thing tomorrow.”

Next to her, Bruce nods. “She has a point,” he agrees, shrugging when Clint glares at him. “This isn’t an Agatha Christie novel, and I’m pretty sure that if I’m not home by nine, Tony’s going to stage a coup with the help of our son and foster children.”

“On second thought, I’m ordering new friends,” Clint grumbles at the two of them, but he’s still working to stand on the edges of a huge, shit-eating smile.

Here’s the thing about real friends, the kind you forge out of choice and not ‘cause you grew up in the same shitty trailer park and had no other options: they’re shitholes. Asses of the highest caliber, the kind that walk into your house without knocking and charm your cat while stealing your booze out from under your damn nose. They’re the literal fucking worst, these friends.

And they’re exactly the kinda people you ask to stand up with you at your wedding. 

It’s late October now, one of those cold and wet autumn evenings that settles into your teeth and makes you wanna pack up and move to Phoenix, but truth is, Clint’s been sitting on this conversation for a good six weeks. Biding his time, mostly, ‘cause he and Phil’d agreed to ask their groomspeople (most of them women, actually) to stand up with them at roughly the same time. Phil’s sister Amy’s already agreed to be one of his best people—Phil’d Skyped with her over lunch while she’d dashed between mysterious bank meetings—but that still leaves Phil’s _other_ best person and these two assholes in Clint’s kitchen.

Two assholes who keep staring at him, so full of expectation and exasperation that Clint thinks they’ll maybe explode from it.

He toys with the stem of his wine glass for a second, suddenly nervous (but for all the right reasons). “You guys know I’m getting married at the end of December.”

“No, really?” Natasha asks. He shoots her a sharp glance, but she just smirks and slings her elbow over the back of her chair. “I had no idea. Bruce?”

Bruce shakes his head. “First I’ve heard about it.”

“Shut up,” Clint grouses, and the two exchange the kinda grins that remind him why they’re friends. “My point here is that we’re getting hitched, at the end of December, up where Phil’s sister Sam lives. Sort of an extended Christmas thing. And Phil and me, we agreed we’d each ask two people to stand up with us. Sort of like groomsmen, but gender-neutral.”

Bruce’s expression shifts a little, almost like he’s surprised, but Natasha holds her poker face like she’s in Vegas for one of those world tournaments. “All the Coulson sisters and your brother, then?”

Clint frowns. “What?”

“For your groomspeople.” She reaches for her glass, and for a split second, Clint catches something warm and maybe halfway touched flickering through her eyes. “Phil loves his sisters, and you and Barney are still on good terms. I’d expect that they’re all standing up with you. A family affair.”

“Except the sisters—well, the two of them—are practically the wedding planners and flat-out refused to wear any extra hats,” Clint replies with a little shake of his head. “Jenny’s a pastry chef, so she’s in charge of dessert, and Sam’s handling all the stuff with the rehearsal and keeping the local businesses on their toes.”

The corner of Bruce’s mouth kicks up into a smile that, somehow, is like ninety-two percent Stark. “From the sounds of it, you’re doubling the town’s economy from flowers and venues alone.”

“Tripling, but don’t change the subject.” His next grin’s all Bruce, all warm and inviting, and Clint grins right back. “Point is, two of the sisters are otherwise indisposed—”

“Must’ve been a vocabulary category on last week’s Jeopardy,” Natasha intones as she sips her wine.

“—and Phil asked Amy to stand up with him already. Leaves three spots.”

“Except the one for your brother,” Bruce points out.

“Yeah, except he’s not coming.” 

Natasha’s eyebrows shoot up at that, her face covered in genuine surprise, and Clint— Well, he sighs like an idiot and drags his fingers through his hair. He’d hoped to dodge a bullet with the whole Barney thing—ask them quickly, fill them with booze and some stupid celebratory cupcakes he’d grabbed from the grocery store, and send them home before anybody asked—but now, they both watch him like he holds the secrets to the universe. His stomach twists just once, and he drops his eyes down to his glass. 

“Barney and his girlfriend, they’re trying to make it work,” he explains after a couple seconds, pointedly ignoring the little note of disappointment that sits in the back of his throat. “Ally, she’s nice enough and everything, but she’s— I don’t know if ‘demanding’ is really the right way to put it, but she really wants him around for Christmas and the couple days after. We said we’d pay for them both to come up for the wedding, but she’s not really interested.” 

“And Barney won’t come without Ally?” Bruce asks quietly.

Clint snorts. “And Barney won’t come if he’s thinks Ally’ll pack up and leave while he’s gone, and that’s what she threatened.” Natasha’s expression hardens at that, her fingers tightening around the stem of her glass. He almost leaves her alone for her ten seconds of anger, but then he remembers that he’s aiming for a _happy_ night. “It’s okay,” he tells her, and she rolls her eyes. “Really, we talked about it. I was pissed for a couple days, but him and Ally being happy’s a pretty big deal.”

She huffs out a breath like she wants to argue, and next to her, Bruce purses his lips. Clint sighs at both of them and starts to reach across the table, but lucky for him. Natasha smacks his hand away before his fingertips even come close to her skin. Her reluctant smile touches her eyes, though, and that’s good enough.

“Phil’s brothers-in-law are gonna be ushers, and since there’s only three of them, Wade’s gonna come up and be the fourth.” Bruce chokes on a mouthful of wine, but Clint grins and ignores it. “That leaves me with two groomspeople spots _wide_ open, and I figured, well, it might as well be you guys.”

Natasha’s poker face—or what’s left of it after her whole “two minutes of righteous anger on his behalf” thing—disappears instantly, and the warm, sort of bright-eyed look that replaces it kicks Clint right in the stomach. She tries to recover, to harden her eyes all over again, but nothing really helps.

But of course, it’s Bruce who fidgets with his watch like he’s suddenly a little nervous. “You want us,” he says.

Clint grins at him. “Nat and I stood up in your wedding,” he reminds him, and Bruce’s whole expression turns sweet and sentimental. “Figured we’d just go full circle.”

Natasha huffs a laugh. “I’m never getting married.”

Bruce shakes his head. “Never say never.”

“No, I’m _never_ getting married,” she repeats, and her tone leaves _no_ room for argument. Clint considers retorting anyway—after all, he’d said the same thing about three thousand times before Phil’d waltzed into his life—but all of a sudden, she’s trained her piercing eyes on him. His mouth dries up in record time. 

They stare at each other for a couple beats before she asks, “You know he’s going to bring his whole family, right?” 

Clint frowns. “Who?”

“Banner.”

Bruce blinks a little like a messy-haired deer in headlights. “Pardon?”

“He’ll bring his whole family,” she continues, “and I’ll bring Pepper, and we will all be subjected to at least three days of her and Stark bickering like children and pulling at one another’s ponytails.”

“You make it sound like Pepper holds any of the blame in that department,” Bruce kinda half-mutters.

“There will be at least one but probably three Banner-and-Stark children harassing your nieces and nephews, and not enough alcohol in the world for us all to pull through without dumping Tony’s body in a cornfield somewhere.” Bruce hides his laugh behind his wine glass, but Natasha holds Clint’s gaze like she’s staring down a reluctant witness in the middle of a jury trial. “You really want to subject Phil to all that?”

Clint surprises himself with the fucking bark of laughter that bursts out of the pit of his stomach. “You’re only worried about Phil?”

“Yes,” Natasha immediately replies.

When he glances over at Bruce, Bruce shrugs. “You’re a lot more accustomed to the pigtail-pulling,” he points out.

“Only ‘cause your husband pulls _Phil’s_ pigtails and I’m left picking up the damn pieces,” Clint retorts, and this time, Bruce can’t totally hide his smug little grin behind the lip of his glass. Clint rolls his eyes at _both_ of them, his smirking asshole friends, and leans his arms on the table. “You want me to tell you that you’re my best friends? ‘Cause I can do that. I can go full-on sentimental asshole, talk about how you both helped me through my first year at the office, suspension included. And I can talk about how I was actually kinda honored to be part of last December’s drive-by wedding, even if Stark practically assaulted me in the hallway to get me there.”

“It was more a battery,” Natasha points out, and the world’s most stricken expression crosses Bruce’s face for a minute.

Clint grins. “Assault, battery, civil tort, _whatever_. My point is: you guys matter, and I want you in Nebraska for my wedding. As my groomspeople.” He pauses for a second, and the spike of anxiety that rushes up out of nowhere almost chokes him. He swallows. “If you’ll have me, I mean.”

There’s this one, tense moment where he thinks Natasha might actually roll her eyes at him and stalk right out of the room, but it breaks when Bruce offers up one of his warmest, gentlest, most heartfelt smiles. “I’d be honored,” he says, and the sincerity in his voice melts the exasperation right off Natasha’s face. “And even though he’ll complain a lot about the month of December and our first anniversary, Tony will be honored to come. Miles, too.”

“And your other two children,” Natasha says.

Bruce sends her the kinda long-suffering side-eye he usually saves for Stark and nobody else. “And _maybe_ Amy and Teddy,” he acquiesces, but under the reluctance, Clint hears how _hopeful_ he sounds.

Natasha nods a little at that, but she keeps her eyes on her glass for a moment longer. They’re distant, almost like she’s lost in her own thoughts, and Clint remembers all at once that apart from him, Bruce, and Pepper, Natasha’s sort of a woman out on a limb. No other close friends, no family (or at least, no family that’s close enough to talk about), nothing she wears on her sleeve. She’s part of Fury’s weird band of orphans and misfits, but Clint sometimes wonders if that’s more because of proximity than actual choice.

He almost says all that, too—or something close to it—when she glances up at him. “I’d be honored, too,” she says softly. “It’s— I never expected to stand up for someone once, let alone twice, but I’d be honored to be there for you and Phil.”

Clint’s not sure what exactly about her answer suddenly fills him to the brim with emotion—whether it’s her seriousness, or the weird tremble in her voice, or the tiny smile that touches her eyes but _not_ her mouth—but his eyes dampen and for one split second, he wants to jump up and hug them both. But they’re not huggers, and Natasha’s still wearing a look like she might punch him in the throat for trying, so he plants his hands on the table and pushes to his feet. “I have groomspeople cupcakes,” he declares. “Red and green frosting, which is kinda weird in late October, but I figured they sorta fit.”

“Fit with what?” Bruce asks, amused.

“With his psychotic break,” Natasha replies, but she’s smiling, too.

They’re halfway through a flat of twelve cupcakes—never mind their second drinks—when Natasha stops sucking buttercream from under her thumbnail and looks suddenly thoughtful. “Speaking of your wedding—”

“Because there’s another topic on the docket tonight?” Bruce questions.

He barely dodges her elbow, laughing, and Clint almost snorts his wine at her briefly constipated glare. “Speaking of the wedding,” she says again, “have you decided what you’re getting Phil for a wedding present? I hear orphaned twelve-year-olds are all the rage.”

Bruce rolls his eyes at that, but Clint grins. “You know, I haven’t gotten it yet,” he admits, leaning his elbows on the table, “but wait ‘til you hear about my plan.”

 

==

 

“You know you can still back out,” Maria suggests as the waitress refills their water glasses. “Not that I’m encouraging you to cut and run or anything. I just want to remind you that it’s an option.”

“You remember I’m the one who proposed, yes?” Phil asks. Maria shrugs at that and reaches for her wine. “Because I’m pretty sure I spent three hours agonizing over it with you, and that’s _before_ Ken Blake stepped in and tried to sabotage my relationship.”

“With help from your terrifying work ethic,” she returns, and he narrows his eyes. He feels his jaw tightening without his permission, but Maria just raises her free hand. “I’m really not encouraging you,” she says again. “But the reality of a wedding, with families and _flowers_ and caterers and children dressed in obscenely expensive outfits while _armed_ with flowers . . . ” She trails off with a little shake of her head. “All that reality is a whole lot different from your shiny married-life fantasy and—”

He sighs. “Maria?”

“What?”

“I need you to tone down the ‘bitter divorcée’ act before I’m forced to uninvite you from my wedding.”

Across the table, Maria Hill—unshakeable, cunning, fearless Maria Hill, Phil’s closest work confidant and one of his three best friends—rolls her lips together. “Am I that bad?”

“Tonight, you’re _worse_ ,” Phil replies, and she glances away as she sips her wine.

Phil sighs again and reaches for the bread basket. He’s not entirely sure what an American-Italian fusion bistro is or why this particular one is named after their area code, but the bread’s warm and the wine list’s longer than Phil’s arm. They’re halfway through a bottle of something rich and red, still waiting for their food. The wait staff’s pace fluctuates between _lackluster_ and _leisurely_ , something Phil might appreciate if he weren’t so gut-wrenchingly nervous.

It’s not his fault, he supposes, that his three closest friends are, in order, his fiancé, his boss, and the other chief assistant district attorney, or that the last of the three’s still reeling from her long-distant divorce. He tries to imagine himself five years down the line, his life with Clint in shambles and his heart still sore from the blow. But as soon as he thinks about it, a dull ache settles into his chest, and he discovers he can’t imagine it, not even for ten seconds.

He almost lost Clint this past summer. He’s not sure he could survive a second round of that hurt.

“I’m not trying to be a buzzkill,” Maria says after a few more seconds, and Phil climbs out of his own (slightly self-pitying) thoughts to find her staring down at her wine glass. “I know I’m not always the best sounding board about this kind of thing—”

Phil snorts. “You think?”

She raises her eyes, her whole expression hardening. “Okay, I’m _never_ the best sounding board about this kind of thing,” she admits, “and I know how unfair that is. You and Clint are happy together. Hell, most couples are happy together, or at least successful. It’s just hard for me to sit by when all my friends are getting married and pretend—”

“That you’re a bitter single girl instead of the something-or-other to the mystery man you spend most your free time sexting?” Phil finishes. Maria jerks with surprise, her mouth falling open, and Phil can’t help his smile. “Everyone knows that there’s _someone_.”

Maria promptly rolls her eyes. “There’s nobody _to_ know,” she replies coolly, but the tips of her ears are bright red.

“Yeah, and the Starks aren’t a court order away from becoming a family of five.”

Her entire face darkens into a threatening scowl, and Phil tries, very hard, not to snicker into his own wine glass. “Do not use Stark as an example.”

“Too on-the-mark?”

“Too horrifying.” Phil laughs, nearly snorting his wine, and Maria’s mouth curls into a genuine smile. She leans forward, her folded hands almost brushing against his fingertips. “I really am happy for you,” she stresses, as painfully serious as the Maria Hill who spends eight hours a day commanding a courtroom. “You know that, right? My own ‘dying alone’ misery aside, I’m really glad you found Clint.”

Warmth creeps out from under Phil’s collar, and he swallows roughly. “I like to think we found each other,” he admits.

Maria sighs. “And now I want to throw up in my mouth a little, so thanks for that,” she returns, and Phil’s momentary flush recedes when he laughs. 

The waitress reappears then, finally armed with their appetizer, and they lose a few moments to greedily devouring breaded artichokes and fried cauliflower. Maria’s eyelashes flutter like she’s in love after every bite, and by the time they’re halfway through their meal, Phil’s grinning at her. “Do you need medical attention?” 

“Given that we _never_ order the artichokes here, maybe,” she returns, and he laughs as she drizzles more aioli on her plate. “God, they were a little undercooked the _one_ time, and ever since, it’s complaints about the service and not trusting the kitchen staff with—”

Phil raises his eyebrows. “And who’s ‘we,’ again?”

She falls abruptly and immediately silent, but this time, the red crawls across her cheekbones. Phil smirks as he spears another few cauliflower crowns, his belly as warm from the food and wine as from Maria’s embarrassment and her company. He apparently wears this warmth on his face, too, because after another couple seconds, Maria jabs her fork in his direction. “Shut up.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but I can hear you thinking it.”

“That’s very George Orwell of you.” Maria scoffs at that, her exaggerated eye-roll reminding Phil more of Stark than anyone else, and he smiles as she returns to vindictively stabbing at her innocent appetizer. “For what it’s worth,” he adds after a few seconds, “I think it’s nice that you’re in a whatever-it-is with your mystery man.”

She scowls at that. “You sound like my brothers when I first met Mark.”

“Except Mark was, according to every drunken rant in the last five years, a ‘limp-dicked asshole with the personality of toe jam,’ and this guy at least takes you out to overpriced fusion bistros and denies you artichokes.” She snorts a laugh at that, very nearly smiling, and Phil promptly swallows around his nerves as he sets down his fork. “You can invite him to the wedding, if you don’t think it’d be too awkward.”

“I’m pretty sure the point of a fuck-buddy is that you _don’t_ invite him to weddings,” she counters. Phil shrugs, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible, but Maria narrows her eyes. “Why would it be awkward?”

“Well, given that it’s a no-strings-attached relationship, I’d think—”

“Except you only _suspected_ it was no-strings-attached until about half a second ago,” Maria counters. He rolls his lips together, and she frowns. “Phil, why would it be awkward?”

“Because from what I understand, it’s hard to be the plus-one of somebody in the wedding party.”

There’s a moment—just one, terrifying, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it split second—where Phil wonders if she’s stopped breathing. She stares at him, wide-eyed, her eyebrows almost at her hairline as her jaw just sort of hangs open. Once, then twice, he thinks she’s trying to formulate words, but it all ends when she rolls her lips together. Her eyes soften first, then her face, and suddenly, she’s slumping her shoulders and shaking her head. “Phil—”

“My sister Amy already agreed to stand up with me,” he says, watching her throat work as she swallows, “and if the unreadable text from Clint is any indication, Bruce and Natasha just agreed to be his groomspeople. You’re one of my closest friends—hell, according to some people, you’re practically my fourth sister—and I’d be honored to have you in my wedding.”

She nods slightly, her eyes trained intently on his face. “And Nick?”

Phil tries very hard to keep his expression neutral. “What about him?”

“Shouldn’t he be standing up with you, instead of me?”

He reaches for his wine glass. “Nick’s not exactly a bachelor anymore,” he says with a small shrug, and he ignores the way Maria tips her head to the side. “Christmas is like a three-day bacchanalia in the Fury household, and that’s not even counting when they fly up to Melinda’s parents’ place for the—”

“Phil.”

She leans on the word, her tone tight and clipped, and Phil sighs. “He was Clint’s groomsperson veto,” he says after a few seconds.

Maria frowns. “Who was yours?”

“Wade Wilson.”

“Okay, now I understand the purpose of the veto,” she replies, and Phil huffs a laugh as he finishes off the dregs of his wine. When he sets his glass down, though, he finds Maria studying his face, her lips still pursed expectantly. “I’m not sure I deserve—”

“You never once chased me away from this relationship,” he cuts off, and he completely disregards the way her jaw tightens when he interrupts her. “You listened to me panic about dating him, you helped keep us from tearing each other to shreds during the Killgrave case, and as much as you’re complaining about dying alone and becoming a cat lady—”

She jabs two fingers in his direction. “I would _never_ become a cat lady.”

“—you’ve never discouraged me. Maria, you’ve never even accused me of moving too fast, which is more than I can say for Nick, or Jasper, or anyone else who joins us for happy hour.” She purses her lips again, her eyes suddenly gentle again, and he rests his elbows on the table so he can lean in. “I’ve never counted myself as a man with a lot of friends,” he reminds her, his voice softer than before. “From the day I graduated law school, I put work first. Makes for a lonely life, sometimes. But I never regretted the fact that my lonely life introduced me to the rest of our office—or to you.”

Maria glances away at that, her hair falling in her face as she casts her eyes out the big picture window in the front of the restaurant. It’s dark now, and the slender trees planted along the sidewalk sway in the October breeze. The waitress reappears, tops off their wine glasses, and glides away.

“I get to plan your bachelor party,” she finally says.

Phil blinks. “Excuse me?”

When she looks back at him, there’s wickedness dancing in her eyes. “If I have to be your unisex groomsperson and put up with several days of you, Clint, and your combined neuroses, I get to plan your bachelor party.” He opens his mouth, but she holds up a finger. “No. No negotiations. This is my _demand_.”

He frowns slightly. “I’m not sure that’s how this whole ‘groomsperson’ thing is supposed to work.”

Her slow-burn smile as she reaches for her drink is one of the many, many reasons Phil likes her so much. “Deal with it,” she replies, and toasts the air with her glass.

 

==

 

“I’m just saying, if all of us will already be down there for a good three or four days anyway—”

Clint stops filling up his glass of ambiguously alcoholic punch to level a glare across the table of snacks. “No.”

Tony scowls. “You have absolutely _no_ idea how I planned on finishing that sentence.”

“I’m pretty sure it ended with something about the month of January and your anniversary, so . . . ” Tony scoffs, his eyes rolling back so hard that Clint actually wonders whether it hurts. Still, and because he’s not a total asshole, he hides his grin behind his fresh glass of punch. “December’s the best time for everyone involved.”

“December is _also_ taken, and I don’t really appreciate—”

At his husband’s side, Bruce sighs and shakes his head. “He said no, Tony,” he reminds his decidedly _less_ -better half, and leads a grumbling, pissy-pants Tony Stark away by his expensive belt loop.

One fun and little-known fact about the judicial complex—at least, according to wedding shower organizer and general pain-in-the-ass Darcy Lewis—is that the jury holding room down on the first floor also occasionally doubles as a party venue. Or at least, it doubles as a party venue when the district attorney’s office stakes an after-hours claim, because right now, the damn thing’s decked out in every wedding-related decoration on the planet: silver and white streamers, weird paper bells, three different _Congratulations!_ banners, and a sheet cake with two very creepy tuxedoed men frosted on the top of it. There’s a pile of gifts that threatens to fall over and kill a small child—a problem, since Dot Barnes and Amy Jimenez are sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the pile and coaxing Astrid Odinson to crawl between them.

Astrid mostly wants to chew on Amy’s hair.

It’s chaos, Clint thinks, but it’s _their_ chaos. 

“So, boss man, what do you think?” Darcy asks, suddenly draping herself across his shoulder like she’s some sort of human stole. She’s wearing her winter scarf—appropriate, since they’re three days from Christmas—along with a blouse that shows off just a little too much skin, but she grins like she’s won the lottery. “Do I put on a party, or what?”

He snorts. “You know we’re not supposed to have alcohol on state property, right?”

“Yeah, except we’re on county property. Trust me, I checked.”

“With who?”

She, maybe predictably, rolls her eyes. “With the hottie in the county commissioner’s office on the third floor.”

Clint cocks an eyebrow at her. “I thought you had a boyfriend.”

“Please, like you never go window shopping,” she retorts. He shrugs innocently. “You’re not perfect. And chief assistant hottie is hot, but he’s not junior assistant county commissioner hot.”

He smirks. “Oh, I think Phil wins without even trying,” he returns, and Darcy gags when he raises his eyebrows like he means a _whole_ host of other things.

She smacks him in the arm, too, and that’s when he laughs, loudly enough that he catches Phil’s attention from across the room. He’s standing in a gaggle with Steve, Bucky, Maria, and the still completely terrifying Melinda May, but the smile that blooms across his face? Yeah, that’s _all_ for Clint. His eyes light up, his crow’s feet bunching, and Clint— He’s not a sentimental asshole most the time, but in that split second, Clint falls in love all over again.

“You two are worse than a Disney movie,” Darcy informs him.

He reaches over and musses up her hair. “Someday, your prince will come,” he assures her, and she slaps his hand before pushing him vaguely in Phil’s direction.

“And here’s where they kiss and make the rest of us feel like we’re slacking,” Bucky complains as Clint walks up, and Clint laughs as he slings an arm around Phil’s waist. “Are you drinking the illegal punch?”

“County property,” Clint and Steve say at roughly the same time. Steve blinks, Clint grins, and they tap their plastic glasses together while Phil pretends his long-suffering sigh somehow trumps his warm, lingering grin. 

Bucky, on the other hand, groans like somebody just stabbed him in the gut. “I’m the last sane one in this group.”

Steve screws up his face like he’s maybe a little offended. “You used to find my knowledge of county and municipal ordinances sexy.”

“No, I used to let you _think_ I found it sexy because it got you all wound up,” Bucky retorts, and this time, Steve’s so genuinely offended that Clint can’t hold back his laugh.

Phil laughs with him, his voice ringing like a low bell in Clint’s ear, and it only pauses when Clint leans in and kisses him slow and sweet. He thinks he hears Bucky groaning again, but he knows the guy well enough to know he’s smiling—and better yet, to know that the sharp huff of breath at the end of his groan is Steve shoving him hard enough that he stumbles a little. Clint chuckles at that, but not enough to break away from Phil, and the kiss lingers way longer than he maybe intends as a result.

“Save the sex for the pillow fort!” 

Tony’s half-shout carries across the jury room easily, but when Clint pulls away—breathless and with a belly that feels mostly like molten lava—he’s able to witness Thor glaring down at their (much shorter) friend with real annoyance in his eyes.

“Allow them this moment,” he says. Between the height and his voice, he sounds vaguely threatening.

Stark’s amazing lack of self-preservation kicks in immediately, and he rolls his eyes. “You say ‘moment,’ I say ‘kissing with tongue where the elementary school kids can see.”

Dot and Amy pop up from behind the giant bowl of puppy chow, their faces as curious as they are guiltily coated in powdered sugar. “People kiss with tongues?” Dot asks.

Steve sighs. “Tony—”

Tony’s hands shoot out in front of him. “Not my fault. Fault firmly lies on the Barton-Coulson coupling. I’m just an innocent party.”

“Except you’re never an innocent party,” Miles mutters from where he’s standing with Bruce, Teddy, Jane, and Peggy.

Tony jabs a finger in his direction. “And _you_ are awfully sassy for a kid who’s on chore-related cell-phone restriction, but hey, what do I know?”

Miles and Bruce both roll their eyes at that, and for a split-second, their expressions are so identical that Clint almost chokes on a mouthful of boozy punch. He’s about to comment on that weird non-genetic quirk when Dot and Amy suddenly run over, sugary shirts and all.

Dot at least brushes her hands off on her leggings before she announces, “I have a question.”

Bucky smirks. “Is it about kissing with tongue?” 

“We are _not_ talking about tongue-kissing,” Steve immediately responds. Dot’s determined expression falters a little, and her dad rubs a hand over his face to hide what Clint suspects is his abject defeat. “Right now,” he amends after a beat. “We’re not talking about tongue-kissing right now, but maybe later, we can—”

“It’s a question for Mister Clint and Mister Phil,” Amy breaks in, and Clint snorts as _relief_ breaks over Steve like a wave. “Because Dot says—”

“Amy can’t be your flower girl,” Dot blurts, and all four adults twist to stare down at her with so much surprise, Clint swears he feels Phil blinking. She shifts her weight like she’s suddenly nervous. “I didn’t get to be Uncle Bruce and Uncle Tony’s flower girl, and since my daddies are her uncles and already had a wedding, Amy can’t be a flower girl either.”

Phil shrugs. “Sounds reasonable,” he says.

Dot nods. “Right. So, because she can’t be my daddies’ flower girl, she can’t be your flower girl either.”

Amy crosses her arms over her chest, and her huffy pout reminds Clint a _lot_ of her one foster father. “I told you I’m nobody’s flower girl.”

“And unfortunately, she’s right.” By the time Clint glances over, Phil’s already hiked up his slacks enough that he’s able to crouch in front of both of the girls. Amy steps back a little, suddenly shy, and he offers her one of his most comforting smiles. “My sister Samantha has a little girl named Clara who’s about the same age as Dot, and she’s going to bring in the flowers and rings for us. Sort of like Dot would’ve brought in the flowers for Bruce and Tony, if they’d remembered to make good on their promise.”

Amy’s reluctant posture starts to deflate, but Dot’s shoulders stiffen. She surveys Phil’s face, then Clint’s, and then returns (eventually) to Phil’s. “You’re her uncles?” 

“Yes.”

“And you picked her because you’re her uncles?”

The amusement that dances in Phil’s eyes is almost more breathtaking than his kiss. “More or less.”

Dot’s whole face lights up like a Christmas tree. “Okay!” she chirps, and within seconds, she’s running off again, Amy hot on her heels.

Steve shakes his head, his embarrassment plain on his face—and maybe worse, on his cheeks and spreading down his neck. “I am so sorry.”

Clint tries very hard not to study the shape of Phil’s thighs as he stands, concentrating instead on the way Phil dismisses the apology with a shrug. “I’m just sorry you can’t come to the wedding,” he says as he helps himself to Clint’s drink. “I mean, aside from the part where I think there’d be a show-down between two five-year-olds.”

“And probably Amy,” Bucky puts in helpfully.

Phil laughs. “I’m hoping her shyness wins out, because otherwise, she and my niece might actually plot world domination.”

Bucky grins, obviously pleased with himself, but it’s Steve who shakes his head again. “If Bucky’s folks hadn’t invited us out—”

“Mostly as peace-keepers between them and Augie,” Bucky intones.

“—we’d be there in a heartbeat.” He smiles, so warm and genuine that Clint swears he feels his own teeth start to rot. “We’re really happy for both of you.”

“Thanks,” Clint says, and he smiles when he realizes that Phil’s said the same thing at the same time.

Thanks in part to the punch and in part to the constant heat of Phil’s arm around his waist, Clint kinda loses track of time after that. He knows they drift between clumps of people, sliding in and out of conversations and laughing ‘til their stomachs hurt, but he’s more focused on how he _feels_ than on the party itself. He thinks back to life twenty months ago, back to his first lonely, muddy days on the job, and realizes that the guy who’d first stumbled into the district attorney’s office one April day is a far cry from the guy who’s marrying Phil Coulson. He wonders whether he’s supposed to mourn that version of himself, the Clint with the criminal record and mountain of secrets threatening to toss an avalanche down on his head.

But then, Phil kisses him on the corner of the mouth and smiles at him like he’s the center of the universe, and Clint remembers that the old him is the one who started him on this journey.

He’s just following it to its logical conclusion.

“Okay, so!” Darcy announces a good hour later, hammering on a plastic glass with an equally plastic knife. She’s balanced on one of the jury room’s rickety chairs, and standing at her side, Grant Ward looks absolutely terrified that she’ll slip and send them both crashing to the floor. Apparently unaware of his terror, Darcy clears her throat. “A long time ago,” she explains, “I started this betting pool with the fine people of this office—Bucky excluded, because he used to play for the other team. Legally, I mean. Not sexually. Sexually, he’s _all_ about the d—”

“Okay, _thanks_ ,” Bucky interrupts, and for the first time all night, his face flares an amazing shade of red.

Darcy wrinkles her nose at him. “Anyway,” she presses, “I started a betting pool. The rules were simple: guess when you think Clint and Phil’ll tie the knot, and whoever comes closest gets to embarrass the shit out of them at their wedding shower.” When she opens her arms, the chair bucks like a wild animal, and it’s only Ward’s quick thinking that keeps her from pitching onto the floor. “Well, exactly a week from today, in some god-foresaken Nebraskan hell-hole—”

“Cheers to that!” Tony calls from the back of the room, and Bruce rolls his eyes.

“—there will be a marriage of epic proportions, and our proud bet-winner? Was only one day off.” She reaches deep into her shirt and pulls out a crinkled piece of paper, oblivious to the fact that a certain thirteen-year-old boy in the back of the room is starting to drool surreptitiously. “Today’s wedding shower speech will be delivered by none other than—wait for it—Phil Coulson himself!”

A general noise of surprise sort of rises up around them, and when Clint twists to stare at the guy beside him, Phil _blushes_. It travels up his collar all the way to his hairline, his face redder than when they’d worked at the Sam’s farm last spring and forgot their sunscreen, and Clint—

Phil glances at the floor and rubs the back of his neck. “To be fair, I meant to pick the Saturday, but I misread my calendar.”

And that’s when Clint surges forward and kisses him. 

He kisses him like a drowning man sharing his last breath with his diving partner, like an action hero before he charges into his last battle, like a man so far in love with his fiancé that he wonders how he ever lived alone. Phil freezes for a moment, caught in what Clint assumes is surprise, but then he’s kissing Clint back. They fall into each other’s arms, Phil’s palms hot against Clint’s neck and Clint’s fingers curling in Phil’s shirt, and they only break apart when they’re out of air.

Clint rests his forehead against Phil’s before he says, “I love you.”

And Phil’s smile is so perfect, so _distracting_ , that they miss Darcy yelling at Phil about his impending speech until she pings her plastic cup off the back of his head.

 

==

 

“So, he’s halfway through direct examination of this stubborn, _stubborn_ witness,” Melinda says, dragging out each word like the world’s most vindictive taffy, “when he realizes that he needs to admit these photos. Now, I’d only gone to observe because Nick told me there was an interesting legal issue—” 

“I think I officially hate _you_ more than I hate this story,” Phil grumbles, reaching for his glass. His half-empty glass, to be specific, a glass that he _swore_ had a lot more whiskey in it just one minute ago. 

Melinda pats his arm like the patient but completely unsympathetic mother that she is. “I’ll order you more whiskey when I’m done with this story,” she promises, and Phil groans when he realizes that he’d said all of that, complaint about his whiskey included, aloud.

The rest of his friends laugh, their chuckling scattered as they try incredibly hard to look like they’re honoring the momentous occasion that is Phil’s bachelor party instead of just laughing at his slightly inebriated ass. Throughout October and November, Maria’d dragged him out to a variety of different bars in the area, forcing him to sample their specialty drinks and gorge himself on deep-fried bar food. Twice, he’d accused her of just wanting him drunk and fat before the wedding; both times, she’d smiled like the Mona Lisa and slid him some sort of electric blue monstrosity that’d tasted like rainbows and despair.

They’d settled on a cop bar just over the Union County border, a dingy place with pool tables, a jukebox, and a massive, laughing bartender who comps every third round. Phil suspects they’re now on round seven or eight, because the room’s a little fuzzy around the edges, and he’s really tempted to pet Pepper’s hair.

“You really didn’t know it was Phil’s first jury trial?” Pepper asks just then, and Phil props his head up on his hand as he tries to focus back in on the story.

Melinda shrugs. “Nick knew.”

Nick snorts. “Even back then, I knew a whole lot of things I didn’t share with the class.” Jasper rolls his eyes at that, and Melinda, who really deserves a wife-of-the-year award for putting up with Nicholas J. Fury at this point, digs in an elbow into her husband’s side. Nick barely squirms. “What? You make it sound like I set you up.”

A surprised little bark of laughter leaps out from the back of Phil’s throat without his permission. “You completely set me up, and you know it,” he reminds his friend. When Nick hides his smirk behind the lip of his glass, Phil jabs two fingers in his direction. “You knew it was my first jury trial,” he presses, “and you knew I was scared to death about it. I practically begged you to keep everybody we worked with out of the courtroom, I was so afraid of throwing up all over my shoes. But because you’re nosy, and a mother hen who pretends he’s not one even when everybody knows the truth, you sent your wife. Like a, one of those—”

He gestures loosely in the air, the right word lingering _just_ outside of his reach. Across the table, James Rhodes raises an eyebrow. “Spy?”

“Right,” Phil agrees. “Like one of those.”

Melinda smiles like she’s won the lottery. “I always knew I’d missed my calling,” she jokes, and slides right back into her story while Phil’s shaking his head at her.

He tries to pay attention to the ebb and flow of her voice, to admire the way she weaves the strands of Phil’s first spectacular courtroom embarrassment together into a glorious, hilarious tapestry, but the lights in the bar cast this dreamy glow over the whole room and distracts him. His mind wanders instead of listening in awe, and he follows it around the table to study the faces of all his best friends. There’s Maria and Jasper, the two of them with their chairs pulled together like they’re sharing a secret nobody else knows while Pepper’s red-blonde hair burns like fire when she shakes her head and laughs. Nick nurses the last of his own whiskey and pretends that he’s not completely caught up in his own wife while she gestures her way through the truly horrifying story of Phil and the stupid crime scene photos. And across the table, Steve and Rhodey both work really hard to hide their ugly, half-embarrassed laughter behind their drinks.

They’re his friends, Phil thinks, their faces flushed from alcohol and laughter, their knees and elbows bumping around the table as they huddle together against the bitter December cold outside the bar. They’re the people in his life who _matter_ , who love him enough to tell stories that leave his face beet red and burning, who’ll either toast him at his wedding or at least be there in spirit.

Somewhere else—probably the High Bar—he knows Clint’s basking in the same experience, surrounded by his groomspeople, his usher, his brother, Darcy Lewis, and, more than likely, an uninvited Tony Stark. He smiles just thinking about it.

Smiles, and probably sighs like a teenager with a crush on a dreamy upperclassman, because Maria suddenly groans. “We’re cutting you off,” she says.

“You can’t cut a guy off at his bachelor’s party.”

“Man’s got a point,” Jasper says, raising his bottle in a little salute. Phil grins at him. He’s not sure he’s _always_ liked Jasper, but right now? Jasper Sitwell’s maybe one of his favorite people in the universe.

Another thing that slips out thanks to whiskey-related lubrication, it seems, because Jasper’s eyebrows bunch together before he glances over at Maria. “On second thought, you might be right,” he tells her, and she pats his leg indulgently.

Phil flops back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest like he’s impersonating Tony at his most petulant. “I bet nobody cut Steve off at his bachelor party.”

Steve snorts a little laugh, but his smile’s as warm as a summer morning. “My bachelor party was Bucky and me at a ball game,” he replies.

Phil wrinkles his nose. “I officially need friends who do the _traditional_ wedding thing,” he decides aloud, and apparently, something about that statement cracks everybody up.

Someone orders a pot of coffee in the next few minutes only to shove a mug in Phil’s direction, and Phil pretends he’s not scowling into the bitter, inky mess as his friends keep walking through their favorite stories. He rolls his eyes and tries his best to look offended, but by the end of every tale, he’s laughing until he’s wheezing and shaking his head at all of them. He suffers through the story about That One Time He Babysat the Fury Twins (capital letters required) and the one about when he assumed that Tony, Pepper, and Rhodey were in some sort of complicated, half-committed threesome, never mind all the tales of his lackluster ex-boyfriends and the one intern who’d nursed a six-month crush on him. (“Well, the intern _besides_ Steve,” Jasper breaks in at one point, and Steve’s face flushes fire-engine red while everyone else laughs.)

But it’s after Phil’s finished his first cup of coffee that Nick Fury, broad and intimidating in his favorite black sweater and slacks—“Because the man refuses to wear jeans,” Melinda’d grumbled when they’d arrived hours earlier—rises to his feet with his glass in his hand. He surveys the table, his eye sweeping across them like they’re in a staff meeting, and Phil ends up adjusting his posture, just in case.

“A while back, I met this guy,” Nick says, and for once he sounds like the friend Phil knows and loves like a brother, somebody who’s as laid back as he is A-type and as warm as he is terrifying. “He was pretty green, almost fresh outta law school, working for the ethics board or whatever name they’re calling themselves this month, ‘cause god knows I can’t follow that shit. Wore this ill-fitting suit, combed his hair like a fifty-year-old divorcée, but the guy’s mind— He had the kind of legal mind that put all the rest of us to shame. And better still, he _believed_ in people.”

Heat creeps up out of Phil’s collar and spreads across his face like a wildfire. “Nick—”

“He believed in people,” he says again, “almost as much as he believed in the law, and I admired the hell outta that. Because unlike most everybody I knew back then, he didn’t care about political ambition, he cared about finding the real facts. Finding the truth. Finding out what _actually_ happened, even in the face of a whole lotta bullshit.” 

Next to Phil, Melinda drops her eyes down to her glass, and Phil can’t help from reaching over and gripping her hand like it’s some kind of lifeline.

Nick just smiles. “I snatched that guy outta the ethics commission the first chance I could,” he continues, “and I brought him to work for me. And I watched him grow into one of the finest attorneys I know, myself included. I watched him build a community around himself, watched him keep being a good man as much as a good attorney, and slowly but surely, he turned into one of my best friends.” His face softens slightly. “Into the godfather of my little girl, and we _know_ how hard I love her.” The rest of the table chuckles, but Phil’s forced to glance away, to focus on some random place on the wall instead of Nick’s even, sincere, knowing gaze. “And now, all these years later and a million miles from who we all used to be, my good friend’s getting married. And as much as I’ve tried—as much as I keep trying—I can’t find the words to say how happy I am for him. So this’ll have to do.”

He pauses then, his voice still ringing in Phil’s ears a little, and when Phil looks up again, he discovers that Nick’s raising his glass. The rest of the table follows, tumblers and beer bottles and Maria’s designated driver soda all raised high and proud as they wait for Phil to follow suit. But Phil’s busy swallowing around the lump in his throat, still fighting against the wave of emotion that’s threatening to drown him.

He almost drops his coffee mug, too, because he swears his hands are shaking from his attempt to hold it together. To not weep like a baby because his friends love him.

“To Phil,” Nick says with finality, “because if anybody deserves a long, happy life with somebody he loves, it’s you.”

Phil knows they all toast, all cheer, all do whatever people at a bachelor party do at the very end of the last speech. He knows it like he knows the beat of his own heart, like he knows the law, like he knows the feel of Clint’s fingers on his skin. But Phil skips all of that, all the glass-clinking and laughing, to rocket out of his chair and grip Nick in a bone crushing hug.

“Thank you,” Phil says, his eyes wet and his breath still half-shaky.

In the low light of the bar, Nick smiles. “Meant every word,” he says, and hugs Phil again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere in this story, the MPU crests one million published words. I know. I am also reeling from this news. How did this happen? The world may never know.
> 
> Additionally: my last two weeks have been really stressful, which is why I am so behind on MPU comments. I will try to get to them this weekend. I also am going to try to put some bonus content on my [tumblr](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com) this weekend. No promises, but I'll make the effort.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me, folks. Here's to a million more words.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
> 
> Or, to put it another way: after a year and a half of cases, conflicts, happiness, and hope, Phil and Clint finally tie the knot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, we revisit the Wright family farm and reacquaint ourselves with most of the extended Coulson family. The cast of Coulson characters is included in the end notes.
> 
> There are two sonnets discussed in this chapter: ["Sonnet 116" by William Shakespeare](http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/116.html) and ["Sonnet XXX" by Edna St. Vincent Millay](http://www.clwilliamson.net/poems/sonnet_30.htm). Look, I used to teach high school English. I have sonnets burned into my brain.
> 
> Thanks as always to my magnificent beta-readers, Jen and saranoh, whose proofing skills are my ever-fixed mark.

Christmas morning in Nebraska dawns crisp and gray, and Phil sighs as he presses his face to the back of Clint’s shoulder.

He soaks in Clint’s heat on the squeaky old bed with the threadbare mattress, his sleep-foggy mind half-aware of a thousand noises down in Sam’s living room. By this point in the morning, the kids are probably all awake, clambering over each other to dig through the presents left by a team of industrious, late-night Santas. Phil and Clint’d stayed up with his sisters into the wee hours of the night, drinking boozy coffee and swearing at the needlessly complicated instructions to Clara’s new Barbie house while the kids all piled together on air mattresses and sofas in the basement. Even this morning, Phil remembers the reflection of the firelight in Clint’s eyes and the shadows of his crow’s feet as he laughed at one of Jenny’s jokes. In the dim light, Clint’d been so beautiful and lively that Phil’d stopped assembling toys to kiss him again and again.

He kisses the back of his neck now, in the almost-light of a gray morning, and Clint releases a noisy little puff of breath. “You waking me up for the good stuff?” he asks against the pillowcase.

Phil smiles. “Do Christmas gifts with all the nieces and nephews count?”

“Not really.”

“Then no, I’m waking you up for the miserable stuff,” Phil answers, and he grins against Clint’s skin when Clint huffs out a laugh.

They linger under the quilt for a few more moments anyway, their legs tangling as they drift in and out of a hazy half-sleep that’s backed by the familiar noises of Christmas morning. Phil traces shapes on the plane of Clint’s stomach while Clint sighs; when he rolls in Phil’s grip, it’s to reach over and tug him down for a sweet, lazy good morning kiss. They tangle together in the sheets, the heat of Clint’s skin quickly chasing away the shock of the morning cold, and Phil buries his fingers in Clint’s hair as they fall deeper into one another.

Last year, Phil’d invited his boyfriend of a few months to his family’s Christmas celebration. Now, that boyfriend is his fiancé, and in a few short days, he’ll be Phil’s husband.

His heart races at that, and when he sighs into Clint’s mouth, Clint moans and rolls his hips up against Phil’s leg.

The door creaks suddenly, and Phil almost jerks all the way off the edge of the bed as someone asks, “Uncle Phil?” 

Shannon’s a mess of uncombed curls and twisted nightgown when she peeks her head in the door, and for a moment, Phil can’t decide which is worse: the blush that’s creeping up his neck and onto his face, or Clint’s disappointed groan.

Shannon, her face still sleep-creased, just rubs her eyes. “Mom wants to know if she should make coffee for you and Clint, or if you’re ‘otherwise disimposed.’” She pauses, frowning. “I think that’s what she said.”

Sam’s cackle echoes through the stairwell like the bells at last night’s church service. Phil sighs and drags a hand over his face. “Tell your mom we’ll be down in five minutes.”

“Ten,” Clint corrects. He’s propped up on his elbows, his hair mussed and his lower lip damp. When Phil narrows his eyes, he shrugs. “Trust me. We’ll be down in ten.”

“Ten minutes, then,” Phil tells his niece, and the door’s hardly closed before Clint’s dragging him back down for another, hungrier kiss. 

By the time they stumble downstairs a full twenty minutes later—Clint with his hair sticking up at all angles, Phil in one of Clint’s t-shirts (since his didn’t quite survive past the fourteen-minute mark)—there’s coffee and muffins waiting for them on the coffee table in the living room, along with a few small boxes labeled with both their names. Phil squeezes onto the couch next to his mother while Clint perches beside him on the arm, and Phil quickly sinks into the warm familiarity of a Coulson family Christmas. The kids toss presents back and forth across the living room, sorting out which gift belongs to whom only to immediately rip through the wrapping paper to reveal the treasures inside. The older girls model sweaters and earrings, the older _boys_ grumble about practical gifts (flannel shirts, crew socks, a new pair of boots for each of Sam’s sons), and the elementary-aged kids fawn over all their new toys, games, and DVDs. It’s all a cacophony of sound, an uncontrolled chaos that twice coaxes a sharp scolding out of an ordinarily laid-back Joe and that only ebbs to a dull roar when there’s a new box to tear open.

Most of the kids wander off after their gifts are open—another Coulson family tradition, Phil thinks with a smile, one that leaves the adults alone to enjoy each other’s company—but a few linger to play with their new cell phones or, in Clara’s case, to drape herself across Phil’s lap. “Hi,” she greets, and Phil only realizes after Clint cracks up that the girl’s stolen the last few bites of his muffin.

Sam heaves a sigh from where she, Jenny, and Alec are cleaning up the last of the kids’ debris. “Go play, Clara.”

“She’s fine,” Clint says with a wave of his hand. Clara tips her head back against his thigh, and he grins as he wipes a smear of blueberry off the corner of her mouth. “Anybody who’s helping me keep Uncle Phil under control’s okay in my book.”

Phil rolls his eyes, but his niece just blinks. “Under control?” she asks.

“You ever seen your Uncle Phil when your mom hands him a plate of those muffins?” Clara shakes her head, her face as brightly curious as it is _incredibly_ serious. “He eats them like they’re gonna grow legs and run away. Like, a hungry, hungry hippo’s got _nothing_ on your Uncle Phil when there’s a box of muffins within arm’s reach.”

Clara giggles. “That sounds like my brothers!”

“Oh, kiddo, it’s a thousand times _worse_ than your brothers, ‘cause I bet even those boys leave you crumbs or something.” He winks, his face warm and his eyes twinkling, and Phil can’t even force another put-upon eye-roll. Clint slides off the arm of the couch and onto the floor, his shoulder pressing against Phil’s knee, and Clara immediately hops into his lap. He releases a breath like she’s winded him, and she beams. “On second thought, I better not let you eat any of Uncle Phil’s muffins. You’re getting too big.”

She scoffs and tosses her messy hair. “I’ll never be too big. Daddy says I’m his little princess.”

Clint narrows his eyes. “You sit in your dad’s lap lately?”

“No.”

“Okay, then don’t call yourself a _little_ anything ‘til that happens,” Clint retorts, and he chases away her immediate pouty face by tickling her sides until she shrieks with laughter. 

Phil’s still admiring them together—Clara red-faced and wriggling, Clint with bunched crow’s feet and a grin like a sunbeam—when his mother reaches over and squeezes his knee. He jolts a little at that, flushing like a teenager caught fixating on the underwear models in a department store catalogue, but she just smiles. “You did well with this one,” she says.

His heart swells enough that it almost chokes him, and he swallows around it. “I’m glad you approve, given that it’s four days before our wedding,” he half-teases.

His mother winks. “You wouldn’t be getting married in four days if I _didn’t_ approve, Phillip,” she returns. “That’s not how it works.”

“I have the battle scars to prove it,” Amy’s husband Paul jokes from the loveseat. He squeaks in surprise when Amy batters him with one of the kids’ discarded slippers. “Hey! It’s not my fault your parents weren’t sold on me until the second time I asked for their permission to propose.”

Phil’s father snorts into his coffee. “Third if you count the time you chickened out.”

Paul’s face immediately reddens. “I never chickened out,” he defends limply. Alec and Joe both cackle at him, and he scowls. “I didn’t! I just decided I wasn’t ready!”

“Says the man who slept with a ring under his pillow for six weeks,” Amy intones as she reaches for her tea. Paul blinks at her, and she rolls her eyes. “Please, I spent enough nights over at your place to know— Uhm.”

The blush that creeps across Amy’s face when she realizes that everyone—her parents, her siblings, her brothers-in-law, and Clint—are staring at her is subtler than her husband’s, but it still manages to creep all the way across her cheekbones and down her neck. 

Phil’s mother raises an eyebrow. “You spent enough nights where, Amelia?”

Amy snorts, but her blush deepens. “Phil _lives_ with his boyfriend,” she reminds them. On the floor, Clint releases a painful-sounding, strangled laugh. “Nobody’s harassing him about his pre-marital _whatever_.”

Jenny grins. “Almost fifty and you still can’t say s—”

“How about _not_ in front of my kindergartener?” Sam snaps, and the brothers-in-law (Paul included) crack up when Jenny sighs and rolls her eyes.

“And for what it’s worth,” Clint says, his cheek resting against Phil’s thigh, “your brother’s kind of a rockstar at the pre-marital _whatever_ we get up to.”

Phil’s father chokes on a mouthful of coffee, and Phil swears for a moment that his whole face bursts into flame. A heavy, expectant silence falls over the living room, and Phil worries for a moment that Clint’s just pushed the conversation too far past Sam’s good-natured jokes about washing their sheets twice a day and the location of the nearest jar of Vaseline. Clint’s smirk falters a little, his eyes dimming, and Phil swallows as he readies a massive apology.

At least, until his father bursts out laughing.

His booming voice, the one that Sam and Jenny both inherited, fills the room, and he nearly dumps his coffee mug in his lap as he slaps his thigh and wheezes for breath. All around him, the other siblings and their husbands release snickers that turn into throaty belly-laughs, and Phil’s stomach unwinds when he realizes that his mother’s practically giggling into her hand. “Your face,” she chokes out between laughs, and Phil realizes in that moment that they all _planned_ this, working together to build the tension until he thought his heart might explode.

“Worse than when we convinced you we’d found your stash of dirty comics back in high school!” Jenny roars, and Sam tips her face against their sister’s shoulder as she tries to stifle her guffaws. “You looked like you were either going to beg for mercy or cry!”

“At least you didn’t steal them for your own purposes, this time,” Phil shoots back, and this time, Clint joins in on his laughter. He reaches down to smack Clint’s head, just a little; Clint only laughs harder. “Did you script the uncomfortable and slightly dirty joke, or did you just seize the opportunity?”

Clint’s eyes sparkle as he tips his head up. “Like the pillow from Wade says: sometimes, you gotta grab life by the thighs and _seize_ it.”

The sisters all crack up again, Amy practically falling off the couch as she cackles, and Phil rolls his eyes. “I can’t wait until you’re one of us and they start plotting against you, too,” he mutters, but the way Clint grins, bright and beautiful as the Christmas tree, reminds him that Clint’s already one-half his own heart. 

 

== 

 

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to be helping us,” Phil’s sister Sam comments, hands on her hips. She’s standing in the middle of the old converted barn that now doubles as sort of a community center and dance hall, her jeans covered in dust and her hair pulled back by a bandana. She’s barely a Coulson aside from her laugh lines and her nose, but she commands the room anyway.

Clint grins as he heaves the bags of silk flowers and whatever-the-hell-else Jenny bought onto the nearest table. “Amy said you needed a big, strong man.”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Amy forgets I’m married.”

From where she’s perched on a nearby table, her head tipped down toward her cell phone, Amy smirks. “No, Amy just found an _actual_ big, strong man,” she returns, and both she and Jenny cackle when Sam flips her off.

Clint ducks his head, half to hide his laugh and half to hide the warmth that climbs up out of his collar and onto his cheeks. Even after a year of the Coulson sisters, he’s still kinda caught off guard by the way they treat him like he’s one of their own, an extra brother dragged right into the fold. 

He almost says all that, too—how much he appreciates them and their willingness to jump on board this whole “wedding” train with the boundless enthusiasm of Dot Barnes at a _My Little Pony_ convention—but when he glances up from the table, he realizes the three of them are staring at him. Not normal staring, either, but burn-a-hole-in-your-forehead staring. It’s the kinda staring that Natasha saves for her biggest, scariest domestic violence defendants, and all at once, Clint’s heart drops into his stomach.

He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Uh, I’m just gonna—”

“The folding chairs can wait,” Amy says, and Clint’s not sure which is worse: the fact that she’s pulled out the full-on _serious business_ Coulson voice, or the fact that she’s actually stowed her cell phone for once. “We need to talk.”

“Talk?” he parrots. It mostly sounds like a squeak.

Jenny nods solemnly. “If you’ve got a minute.”

“You know that sounds bad, right?” Clint asks. “Three terrifying Coulson women wanting to ‘talk’ to their future brother-in-law with no witnesses? I think we’ve prosecuted cases like this, back in my office.”

Sam’s mouth curves into a slow, sly smile. “The badness of this conversation is totally up to you,” she says.

“Yeah, and _that_ just makes it sound ten times worse,” Clint returns.

The sisters’ shared laughter is the least comforting sound in the world.

Amy slides off the table and beckons everybody to follow her, and after about three seconds’ hesitation, Clint falls into step ‘cause, as far as he knows, that’s what little brothers are supposed to do. They’re supposed to listen, to follow, to ask questions only if they wanna get smacked upside the head. At least, in Clint’s experience.

He thinks back to all the times Barney’d dragged him along with him, an arm slung around his neck as he led Clint off to smoke a couple joints or to shoot out some windows of that abandoned warehouse with Trick’s crossbow. The memory of Barney’s crooked, shit-eating grin and the spark of mischief in his eyes sends a sudden bolt of sadness through Clint, though, and he’s forced to shake it off. Barney’s home in Trick’s old trailer, Ally at his side, enjoying his first family-style Christmas in god knows how long. Clint’s gotta appreciate that. 

But he misses him a little, too. Just another part of being a brother, he figures, and he catches the door to the foyer just the second before it hits him in the face.

There’s couches and a coat room out here, nothing fancy, and he follows the sisters as they all crowd together on one of the sofas. He takes the chair by himself, and his stomach kinda twists in a knot as he realizes that they’re back to staring. He nervously wipes his hands on his jeans and tries to force a smile. “Is this the part where you tell me you secretly hate me and want me to get lost? ‘Cause my name’s on his mortgage and we’ve got a cat, so heading for the hills’ll be a little harder than—”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Oh, stop it,” she chides, her tone a lot like the one she saves for her kids. “You really think we would’ve let Phil get to the wedding stage if we hated you? We practically begged him to propose.”

Amy snorts. “More than once.”

“I think our exact reaction when he finally pulled the trigger was ‘took you long enough,’” Jenny chimes in, and both of her sisters nod in agreement. “I think if he’d waited much longer, Amy would’ve proposed _for_ him.”

“I know a good thing when I see it,” Amy replies with a shrug, and Clint pretends not to feel the heat that crawls up the side of his neck. “You two are good for each other. We didn’t want Phil to let you slip out from between his fingers.”

“The feeling on that’s pretty mutual,” Clint admits. All three sisters grin at him like he just picked the right answer off a multiple choice test, but he fidgets anyway, fingers carding through his hair. “So, uh, if you’re not running me off, what are we talking about?”

Sam brushes a few loose strands of hair out of her face and then leans forward, her elbows on her thighs and her fingers tangling between her knees. All at once, she’s as serious as a heart attack, and Clint feels his whole body sorta tense up. “The girls and I did the math this morning,” she says after a beat, “and if you ignore Jenny’s first marriage—”

“Which everyone should do,” Amy mutters. Jenny elbows her.

“—the three of us, together, have been married almost as long as Phil’s been alive.”

Clint grinned a little. “Last I checked, kids still rode dinosaurs to school when Phil was born.”

Sam and Jenny snickered, but Amy just jabbed a stern finger in his direction. “Some of us have seven years on our baby brother, you know.”

“Means you had a really _nice_ dinosaur,” Jenny intones, and Amy rolls her eyes hard enough that Clint feels it in his teeth.

He laughs, too, the tension of the whole “sitting down to talk” scenario lifting—at least, until Sam’s serious face returns. She toys with her wedding band for a couple seconds before finding his eyes. “We’ve got a lot of years of marriage between us,” she says again, “and with that, we’ve kind of seen it all, you know? Kids, moves, fights, almost-divorces, illness, financial scares— Everything in the standard vows, we’ve fought our way through. And with the exception of Jenny’s first marriage—”

“I was eighteen and _stupid_ ,” Jenny breaks in with a little sigh.

“—we’ve come out swinging.” Sam pauses just long enough to catch Clint’s gaze, and he’s once again surprised at how much her eyes remind him of Phil’s. They’re warm and bright, and even when Sam purses her lips, he can see her laugh lines. “We want the same for our brother,” she says after a few beats. “We want him to be able to say the same to, I don’t know, one of his friends. To our kids when they get married.”

Clint worries his lips together and glances out the big picture windows that line the front of the barn-slash-dance-hall. He studies the glare of the sun on the snow, his pulse hammering in his ears. He rubs his palms together, tangles and untangles his fingers in his lap, and finally, swallows. 

“You think I’m gonna cut and run,” he says. It’s definitely not a question, and the breath that follows it feels just about as shaky as it sounds. He runs his fingers through his hair again. “You think that if the going gets tough with Phil, I’m gonna head for the hills and—”

“ _No_.”

Amy’s voice—sharp and tight, like Phil when he’s pissed off—snaps him back into the moment, and when he twists toward the couch, he discovers that all three sisters are gaping at him. Sam’s so white-faced that Clint thinks for a second that she might faint, and Jenny—

From where she’s seated in the middle, Jenny smacks both of her sisters in the arms. “ _This_ is why I told you guys to skip the whole ‘if you ever hurt him, we’ll burn your house down while you sleep,’ you idiots,” she chides sharply. “My god, do you even listen to yourselves when you talk?”

Sam snaps her head around to glare at her. “In my defense—”

“No, no _defense_ , Samantha,” Jenny retorts. “Sometimes, you two are the worst.” Amy rolls her eyes at that, but Jenny ignores that and Sam’s frustrated little sigh as she leans forward. She smiles gently at Clint, and for the first time, he feels significantly less likely to throw up all over his jeans. “Marriage is hard,” she says seriously. “Sometimes, it sucks. Sometimes, you want to throttle your husband. Other times, you want to kick him out of the car and make him take Amtrak home because he’s being such an asshole.”

Amy frowns. “Didn’t you do that to Alec once?”

“You’d do the same to Paul if he was criticizing your every move while you were _also_ trying to deal with five cranky kids,” Jenny returns. Clint ducks his head to hide his grin, but she catches it and immediately beams at him. “It’s not an easy road,” she continues, “and we just wanted to tell you that. And to remind you that Phil’s not always so great at using his words like a grown-up.”

“Understatement of the year,” Sam mutters, and an unexpected laugh sorta bursts outta Clint. She blinks at that, but a second later, she’s grinning. “You’ve noticed that about him?”

“And he’s noticed the same thing about me,” Clint assures her. Her face falls at that, almost like she’s suddenly kinda worried, and he raises his hands. “We’re both working on it,” he promises, and Sam’s shoulders relax a little. “It’s— We’ve both got our things we’re not super good at, you know? Our baggage and whatever. But we’re working on it now, and we’ll keep working on it ‘til we’ve got it figured out.” His face starts to warm a little, and he swallows it down. “It’s too important not to.”

Amy leans back on the couch, her smile sweet and easy. “You love him a whole lot, don’t you?”

This time, there’s no swallowing around the flood of heat that spreads across his cheeks. “I plead the fifth on that one,” he defends, and the sisters all laugh again.

It’s a half hour later when Sam walks up to where Clint’s loading folding chairs onto a flatbed cart and unexpectedly slings an arm around his shoulders. He starts a little, surprised, but he melts when Sam tugs him into a warm, welcome hug. She smells like vanilla and cinnamon, homey Christmas smells, and he closes his eyes as she rubs her hand down his back.

“Sorry for the stupid shovel talk,” she murmurs, voice lost somewhere against his shoulder. “We never thought for a second that you’d cut and run.”

Clint shrugs slightly. “It’s not that big of a deal, given how squirrely I can—”

“No.” She pulls back, her hands sliding to grip his upper arms, and he almost laughs at the intense seriousness that spreads across her expression. “You’re our family now, and what we did— That’s a shitty thing to do to family.”

He stills, but his eyes drop to the floor anyway, almost like he’s a kicked puppy or something equally pathetic. “Technically,” he says carefully, “I’m not family ‘til—”

“Oh, shut up,” Sam interrupts, and pulls him in for another hug.

 

==

 

“Just think about it for a minute,” Tony says, and Phil bites the inside of his cheek to keep from rolling his eyes for what feels like the hundredth time in ten minutes. “It’d be like an all-expenses-paid pre-honeymoon. A honey-preview, if you will. Just you, Barton, and a giant hotel room on the Magnificent Mile. And in, oh, let’s say, four days, Bruce and I’ll pick you up from the airport back here in Nebraska and whisk you away to your glorious wedding.”

“On January second,” Phil notes. Next to him, Pepper nearly snorts her wine.

Tony, however, rolls his eyes up toward the ceiling, his expression the very picture of innocent confusion. “ _Would_ that mean you’d get married on the second? I’m so bad at math, I had _no_ idea that—”

“The engineer had no idea?” Teddy Altman asks from where he’s standing at Tony’s shoulder.

Tony twists around for what Phil assumes is the express purpose of poking Teddy’s shoulder with his index finger. “First,” he says while Teddy swallows a laugh, “I’m a former engineer. Traded in all my math skills the second I entered law school. And _second_ , don’t you have a little sister to be corralling? Because last I checked, you volunteered for sister-corralling tonight so you can avoid it tomorrow.”

Teddy shrugs. “I’m multitasking.”

“No, you’re sounding like Bruce, and that’s instantly suspicious,” Tony retorts. Teddy raises his eyebrows expectantly, and Tony heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Anybody else remember the glory days when I could harass people _without_ the peanut gallery?” 

Pepper cocks her head to one side. “What you really mean is you could harass people without accountability.”

He waves a hand. “To-may-to, to-mah-to. Coulson, think about my offer while I go remind my husband how it’s not nice to gang up on the guy who regularly gives him he—”

Teddy plasters his hands over his ears, but not before his cheeks flare lightly pink. “I think Amy needs me!” he announces, promptly retreating in the exact opposite direction from Tony. 

Pepper sighs. “And to think, I turned him down fifty-two times,” she grumbles, and Phil can’t help laughing. 

The Goldenrod Ballroom at the local hotel usually looks like something out of an old movie, what with the mint-green wallpaper that’s peeling inconspicuously in a few corners, the white wainscoting, and the floral drapes with the subtle gold thread woven in. Sometimes, Phil pictures Samantha’s mother- and father-in-law attending their senior prom in this very room, their shoes scuffing along the same worn carpet that he’s presently standing on. 

Tonight—thanks mostly to the full Jenny Nicolas (neé Coulson) treatment—it’s slightly more presentable, all the table trimmed in crisp linen, decorated with tasteful centerpieces (that, judging from the hints of purple, might just reappear at the wedding reception tomorrow night), and packed full-to-brimming with Phil’s family and friends. His younger nieces and nephews chase each other (and Amy Jimenez) around the outskirts of the room while the older kids (and Miles Morales) gather in a corner and compare cell phone specs; his sisters, brothers-in-law, and friends sit or stand throughout the room, exchanging stories over wine. 

For the first time in what feels like his entire life, Phil’s whole world is packed into one dated ballroom. No surprise that his heart wants to beat right out of his chest and fly away, then.

“Uh-oh,” a familiar voice says, and Phil raises his eyebrows at Maria as she sidles up to him. “I know that face. _That_ is the face of a man about to go all disgustingly sentimental on anyone dumb enough to stand less than five feet away.”

Pepper purses her lips like she wants to laugh, and Phil rolls his eyes. “I’m allowed to feel slightly sentimental at my own rehearsal dinner.”

“Slightly, yes, but you look like you’re ready to deliver a rousing speech. All ‘friends, Romans, countrymen—no, seriously, men who live here in the country—lend me your ears and your—’”

“Okay, how many rum-and-cokes have you had? Because I’m about to cut you off.” Maria shrugs, lifting her glass of soda-and-whatever-else in a tiny mock-salute, and Phil huffs a breath at her. “And by the way, I’m not trying to be sentimental. It’s just nice to have everyone I care about together in the same place for once. It’s never really happened before.”

Maria frowns. “Please tell me you meant ‘everyone I care about, and also Tony Stark.’”

He snorts a laugh. “Everyone I care about, plus Bruce’s human baggage, yes,” he corrects, and Pepper almost chokes on her wine for the second time that evening.

Maria smirks at that, her eyebrows bright with mischief (and, as previously stated, probably rum), but once Pepper recovers, she shakes her head. “All arguments about Tony really _not_ being that bad aside,” she says, leaving Maria to scoff aloud, “I think it’s nice. I never imagined that the extended Coulson family was so—”

“Shamefully Midwestern?” Phil offered.

She glared at him, and he shrugged. “—much like every other big, sprawling extended family I’ve met. It’s a little like our office, except everybody here’s related.”

Maria grins. “Another twenty-five years of kids and weddings, you might have to retract the second half of that sentence.”

Pepper hides her amused little half-smile behind the lip of her wine glass, but then Tony bellows her name like a dying man and she excuses herself. “Probably going to throttle him,” Phil predicts, but given that Tony’s holding court with Bruce, Natasha, Clint, and a good half the nieces and nephews, he can’t be _totally_ sure about that. Maria hums her agreement, still nursing her drink, and Phil shifts to squint at her.

She swallows. “What?” 

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

“Phil, I know you love to talk in riddles, but—”

“You’ve been acting weird all day,” he cuts in, and she at least rolls her eyes before casting her gaze down at her half-empty glass. “You avoided me at lunch, you got twitchy when Bruce was practicing the reading—”

She huffs a breath at him. “Yeah, because I’ve heard the whole ‘love is patient, love is kind’ verse so many times that I have to fight my gag reflex every time I hear it,” she retorts.

“—and now, you’re snide.” She opens her mouth to protest, and he holds up a hand. “More snide than usual, then,” he corrects, “but still worse than I would’ve expected, especially after the whole ‘bitter divorcée’ routine back when I asked you to come stand up with me.” She rolls her lips together, her face almost guilty, and something like worry starts to curl its fingers around Phil’s gut. He touches her arm. “If something’s going on, we can—”

“It’s just the Broderick case,” Maria blurts suddenly. Phil blinks in surprise, but she just shakes her head, almost like she’s clearing away the cobwebs. “I’ve been back and forth with a couple witnesses, and it’s just this huge _knot_ that I can’t—” She trails off, her fingers tightening around her glass like she wants to shake it. “I reviewed the case file on the plane, and it’s still all stuck in my head.”

He raises an eyebrow. “And that’s it?”

She nods. “Honestly.” He must still look skeptical—or if not skeptical, then _worried_ —because Maria reaches out and squeezes his wrist. Her hand’s cold from her glass, but it’s familiar too, and he abandons his last threads of concern to smile. “And Pepper’s right, by the way. About it being nice to have everybody here. I— Times like this, it makes me wish I had more of that in my life, you know?”

“If the roles were reversed, we’d all be there too,” Phil promises, and she smiles softly as she knocks their glasses together in a sort of mock toast.

The caterers finish setting up dinner just a few minutes later, and slowly, the room lapses into the kind of comfortable lull you’d probably expect from a couple dozen people stuffing their face with barbeque. Phil’d rolled his eyes at Sam’s dinner selection when she’d first texted to tell him about it— _Best in town and I don’t want to hear about how it’s a bad idea with kids and Clints in tow_ , she’d informed him—but it’s piping hot and slathered in sauce, just the way he likes it. He and Clint sit at a “head table” of sorts with his parents, their groomspeople, and his two other sisters; twice, Clint almost laughs himself sick at some shameful story about Phil’s teenage years.

“I also liked baseball,” he defends as his mother once _again_ regales the group with the story of him volunteering as the varsity team manager to “watch the cute boys in their tight pants.”

“Nobody likes baseball that much, son,” his father counters, and Bruce laughs until he’s wheezing. 

The girl who’s running the open bar—barely old enough to buy a drink herself, Phil suspects, but old enough that E.J. and Westley both drink sodas like dying men just to catch her eye—stops by the table and hands out fresh drinks, and Maria waves her off as she sets down her water glass. “Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask: who the hell picked the whole ‘love is patient’ verse, anyway?”

Phil and Clint both roll their eyes. “Not this again,” Clint groans, and Natasha nods in solemn agreement.

Maria levels a finger at all of them. “Complain all you want, but that verse is a pox upon this great nation and an _instant_ snooze-fest.” Sam and Jenny both hide their grins behind their wine glasses while Phil’s own mother offers a traitorous, tinkling laugh. “There are literally a thousand better readings out there in the universe, especially for half-atheists like you two.”

Phil almost groans when the smile immediately drops of his mother’s face. “Nobody’s a half-anything,” he promises her and her curiously raised eyebrows. Next to him, Amy snickers. “And for the record, First Corinthians was my second choice.”

Natasha cocks her head to the side. “What was the first?”

Clint snorts, but his lips curl into a funny little half-smile. “Some sonnet or something.”

“Not just _some_ sonnet,” Phil corrects, and he nudges Clint’s shoulder when Clint shrugs like he’s clueless. They end up leaning together a little, the smile still playing around the edges of Clint’s mouth. “Shakespeare. Sonnet 116.”

“‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’” Bruce quotes, his voice low and lilting. Phil tries to ignore the strange pang in his chest that follows, the one that imagines what Bruce’d sound like reading the sonnet in the hall the next day. Lucky for him, Bruce smiles a little and shakes his head. “There are better sonnets, actually.”

Phil frowns. “Like what?”

Amy groans. “Now you’ve done it.”

Their mother reaches over to elbow her, but Bruce just shrugs as he reaches for his beer. “I like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet XXX. ‘Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink nor slumber nor a roof against the rain.’” 

Natasha sends him a sharp, dubious glance. “You really expect us to believe that your favorite sonnet is one about love _not_ being everything?”

Bruce’s brow tightens. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You mean besides the way you keep glancing across the room at Tony like some kind of star-crossed lover?” Clint asks, and the whole table laughs when Bruce pales a little and starts playing with his napkin.

“You think we’ll ever be like them?” Clint asks a little while later, when they’re the last people lingering at their table. Phil tears his eyes away from where his parents are talking with Bruce and Tony; Clint avoids his gaze, but he shrugs like he knows Phil’s looking. “You’d expect with them that the luster’d kind of fade, you know? They were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship when they got married. Hell, Darcy had a betting pool on whether they made it a year or not.”

Phil raises an eyebrow. “How much money did you lose?”

“Just for that, I’m spending my fifty dollars of _winnings_ on the beer you don’t like,” Clint retorts. 

Phil laughs, but when he’s finished shaking his head, he finds that Clint’s watching him carefully, his eyes soft and cautious. His own smile falters a little—at least, until he reaches out and slides his hand into Clint’s. “I think Bruce and Tony love like an atomic bomb, most the time,” he says. “They’re big and loud, almost dangerous, and they definitely leave a crater behind them. Or worse, a string of children they _swear_ they’re not keeping.” Clint snorts a little laugh, and Phil slides over until he can rest his cheek on Clint’s shoulder. “They’re a storm, and we’re— I don’t know. We’re the tide. Steady. Predictable. And even when we ebb and flow, we’re always _there_.”

When Clint smiles, Phil swears that he feels it in his whole body, right down to his toes. “We’re the star to every wandering bark, right boss?” he teases, eyes sparkling.

“Right,” Phil replies, and he kisses Clint until a full ten seconds after Tony yells at him to knock it off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phil's parents are Elizabeth and Craig Coulson.
> 
> Phil's oldest sister, Amy, is married to Paul. They work at a bank doing mysterious bank business. They have two teenage sons named Westley and Jackson.
> 
> Phil's middle sister, Jenny, is married to Alec. She is a pastry chef; her husband is a professor. They live in Chicago. Jenny has three teenage step-children (Carolina, E.J., and Penny), and she and her husband have preteen twins named Earl and Ernie. 
> 
> The youngest of Phil's sisters is Sam, who is married to Joe. They live on and run Joe's family farm, which is where everyone always spends Christmas. They have four kids: Joey, Will, Shannon, and Clara. Clara is Dot's age. 
> 
> Unrelated to Coulson family antics: I wrote a number of ficlets on tumblr this past week. They included [a Bruce-and-Tony anniversary story](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/105645349912/happy-anniversary-bruce-and-tony), [a Kate Bishop birthday story](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/105661449087/happy-birthday-kate-bishop), and [a Christmas story featuring Sam Wilson and his boyfriend Riley](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/106056285792/mpu-holiday-ficlet-the-rise-and-fall-of-grace). If you like ficlets, you should read these. If you don't, well, that's cool too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
> 
> Or, to put it another way: after a year and a half of cases, conflicts, happiness, and hope, Phil and Clint finally tie the knot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emphatic and enthusiastic thanks to Jen and saranoh, my two wonderful beta-readers who have embraced and weathered this adventure with me, through all the highs and lows. They are fantastic and invaluable, and I count myself so lucky to have them.

“You know this is weirdly foreboding, right?” Clint asks his friends, and the three of them roll their eyes like they’ve spent the last six weeks practicing the move. “It's not that I don't trust you—”

“Except you obviously don’t,” Natasha mutters as she yanks open the door to the barn slash wedding venue.

Wade Wilson raises his fist. “Bump it, sister.” Natasha raises an eyebrow, and for a moment, they simply stare one another down. Then, Wade shrugs. “Good enough for me,” he decides, and slides through the door.

Natasha sighs. “You could’ve picked any other usher in the _world_ ,” she reminds Clint under her breath, and Clint and Bruce purse their lips to avoid laughing at her as they slip in after Wade.

Bruce returns to texting his husband—something about go-go boots and sweater dresses, from what Clint’d read over his shoulder in the car—but Clint just crosses his arms over his chest. The foyer where the Coulson sisters questioned his marital integrity’s still dark, as is the big hall beyond it. Somewhere out there, his tuxedo’s hanging over the back of a chair, along with Bruce’s suit and Natasha’s dress. They’ll dress in a couple of the tiny rooms in the back of the hall, and in about two hours, Clint’ll meet Phil at the end of the aisle to walk down and get married.

His stomach swims just thinking about it. 

He pushes the nerves down into the deepest, darkest part of his belly—the part where all his insecurities live and breed like some kinda weird colony of fungus—and cocks his head at Natasha. “Explain,” he says simply.

She stops sorting through the keys on the ring Sam’d handed her this morning and blinks. “Explain what?”

“Why you’re acting like the cats who shared a canary over tea or something.” Bruce snorts a laugh, and Clint resists his urge to glare at him. Hovering over by the door, Wade tips his head toward the ceiling and starts whistling “Yellow Submarine.” “See?” Clint asks, jerking his head in Wade’s direction. “That’s not normal.”

Natasha shrugs. “It’s normal for Wilson.”

“She’s not wrong,” Bruce agrees.

Wade abruptly stops whistling. “I kind of want to be offended, but I kind of also have a healthy fear of Doctor Banner’s legendary temper.” Bruce glances up from his phone just long enough to frown, but Wade just shrugs. “Your reputation precedes you. Actually, it’s got like a drum and bugle corps to let everyone know it’s coming, because _yikes_.”

Bruce considers this for a couple seconds, but then, the corner of his mouth kicks up into a smile. “Please repeat that the next time you see Tony.”

Wade salutes. “Can do, Doctor Scary.”

Clint waves them off to jab a finger in Natasha’s direction. “You’re up to no good,” he accuses.

Her slow-burn smile hides her teeth while still showing the deep, abiding evil that lurks in the depths of her soul. “I never promised I was good,” she says casually, and unlocks the door to the hall itself. 

Clint snorts and shakes his head, hanging behind as he waits for the others to file into the hall behind Natasha. Except for the eerie glow from the couple exit signs, it’s dark and still like something out of a movie. Clint half expects something to leap out of the shadows at him—maybe a practical joke, maybe something more sinister—but he keeps that thought to himself as he trails behind his friends.

Truth be told, he’s keeping a whole lot of thoughts to himself, today.

He’d woken up in the dead of night, his heart in his throat and his nerves buzzing under his skin. They’d raced through his veins like electricity, and the current’d driven him out of bed and into the tiny bathroom across the hall from Sam and Joe’s guest room. He’d splashed water on his face, paced the tile floor, and mussed up his hair past recognition, all in the name of calming himself down.

Hadn’t worked, necessarily, but you can’t blame a guy for trying.

When he’d slunk back into bed a half-hour later, his face still damp and his hands kinda trembling, Phil’d rolled into his personal space and slung an arm around his waist. His breathing, warm and familiar, had tickled the back of Clint’s neck, and slowly, all the tension’d unspooled.

He’d almost drifted back off to sleep when Phil’d murmured, “Better?”

Clint’d released an uneven little laugh. “Am I seriously that predictable?”

“Sometimes,” Phil’d replied, and Clint’d felt the curve of his smile against his skin.

That smile’d lingered all morning, too, bunching Phil’s laugh lines and glimmering in his eyes all the way through breakfast, their showers, and right up until their last lingering kiss as unmarried men. And even then—pinned against the wall under Phil’s weight, Phil’s hand cupping his face while he’d tangled his fingers in Phil’s belt loops—Clint’d sworn that he felt its warming comfort radiating outward, sweeping over his skin until he’d pulled away to pant against Phil’s cheek.

“I don’t wanna wait,” he’d said quietly, his lips brushing close to the corner of Phil’s mouth. “Let’s just run down to the hall, do it quick and dirty, and then skip to the party.”

Phil’d laughed breathlessly. “We’ve spent too much time planning to elope at the last minute.”

“Pretty sure it’s not eloping if you run off to your wedding venue, boss,” Clint’d teased, and Phil’d actually rolled his eyes before leaning in to kiss Clint again.

Clint swears for a second that he can still feel the heat of Phil’s mouth on his, and he’s so caught up in that thought that he almost trips right into the last row of chairs. Instead, he side-steps right into Wade, and the both of them teeter like one of those wobbly plastic toys Phil’s niece loves so much.

Wade grabs a chair with one hand and Clint’s shirt with the other, steadying them both. “If you die on your wedding day, somebody has to get married in your place,” he says, “and I am just not ready for that kind of long-term commitment with my incredibly hot and very understanding boyfriend.” 

Clint rolls his eyes. “You learned sign language for his daughter and bought him a watch that cost more than your car. Pretty sure that’s your version of a marriage proposal.”

Wade flares red from his shirt collar all the way up to his hairline. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” he mutters. “Absolutely nothing, please stop talking forever.”

“Are we talking about Wilson’s inevitable marriage again?” Natasha asks from behind them. There’s at least two plastic garment bags hung over her shoulder.

Wade’s head jerks up hard enough that Clint’s teeth rattle. “Do you need help with those? Because talking about my love life’s great and all, but I’d much rather do the heavy lifting and leave you to silently ponder the mystery of my—”

“So that’s a yes,” Natasha interrupts, and Wade releases a sound like a dying antelope that Clint, Bruce, and Natasha all laugh at.

Natasha heads toward the back room after that, still chuckling under her breath at some or all of them, and Clint releases a laugh huff of laughter as he steps back to survey the hall. For a few seconds, he feels like he’s living in a Mumford and Sons music video—everything’s rough-hewn wood and hand-sewn linen, and fat-bulbed fairy lights hang around the perimeter of the room—but somehow, the thought warms him. From the simple dais where they’ll say _I do_ to the centerpieces with the sorta old-fashioned glass, it all reminds him of his relationship with Phil in a way. It’s all borne of hard work, of sweat and blood and maybe even some tears, and still it’s all _here_ , in this hall, waiting to be surrounded by love and laughter and everything else.

His life with Phil, it’s a little like that, too.

He snorts at himself, ready to shake his head a little, when Wade knocks their shoulders together. “You having a crisis of confidence?” he asks. “Because I’ve heard that’s natural, with the pre-wedding jitters and everything, but I’m _really_ not planning to get hitched in your place, especially since Coulson isn’t really my type and—”

Clint raises his eyebrows. “What happened to Phil being weirdly hot?” 

“There’s a difference between ‘will happily imagine a foursome while relieving some stress in the shower’ weirdly hot and ‘will marry you because your fiancé kind of freaked out at the eleventh hour’ weirdly hot.” Clint laughs a little at that, and Wade screws up his face before knocking their shoulders together a second time, harder than before. “You’re allowed to be nervous,” he says after a beat.

Clint presses his lips together. “And if I’m not nervous?”

“Then you’re lying, because I know how you look when you’re nervous, and it is _all_ up in here right now.” Wade gestures generally to Clint’s entire face, and Clint rolls his eyes as he pushes his hand away. “It’s a big day,” Wade presses when Clint glances up at the beams that crisscross the high ceiling. “Maybe the biggest day of your life, unless you somehow acquire a small dirt magnet and name it, like, Clint-Phillip Junior. People who aren’t nervous on big days are idiots.”

The corner of Clint’s mouth kicks up into a tiny grin. “And you learned this when? During your time as their spokesperson?”

Wade shrugs. “More as their Diplomat of Dumbassery, but otherwise, you’re right on the money.”

Clint shakes his head, but not without laughing, and Wade beams like he’s won the lottery when Clint reaches over to clap the guy on the shoulder. He half-expects a comment about “bro-bonding” or becoming “blood brothers, but not in a creepy cult-like way” (Wade’s two favorite phrases, lately), but Bruce interrupts them. “Tony wants me to assure you that the eagle has landed, the rabbit is in the hutch, and—” He pauses to glance down at his phone. “—quote, ‘the motherfucking snakes are off the motherfucking plane.’” 

Clint grins. “You regret delegating the secret mission to him instead of Pepper?” he asks.

“Only every five minutes,” Bruce replies, but his sparkle in a tiny smile that proves exactly how hard he’s lying.

Wade immediately leaps into action, engaging Bruce in a complicated conversation about elementary school fashion sense (further proof, Clint thinks, of just how much Wade’s buried himself in Nate’s world); Clint listens for a few seconds but then leaves them alone to hunt down Natasha. He skims his fingertips along the backs of the chairs that’ll seat their guests and admires the fairy lights one last time, committing it all to memory before he ducks into the little hallway that leads to the dressing rooms. Next time he steps out into the hall, it’ll be lit up and lively, a glowing beacon full of everybody he loves.

And he’ll be standing up with Phil, he reminds himself, and swallows around the way his stomach swims again.

The dressing room he’s supposed to share with Bruce—Natasha’d claimed the biggest one as her own during the rehearsal dinner and had threatened Clint with a fork when he tried to negotiate a trade—is all the way at the end of the hall. The door’s half-shut, but there’s light spilling out into the near-dark and the smell of coffee on the air. He rolls his eyes as he approaches, almost smiling. “You know,” he says, loud enough that his voice’ll carry all the way to Natasha, “I’m not sure I need to add caffeine to everything I’m feeling right now, but you get extra credit for trying to be a good—”

Except the words dry up the very second he pushes open the door. ‘Cause standing in the dressing room in dress slacks and a button-down, his tie crooked but _on_ , is Clint’s brother Barney.

For the first couple seconds, Clint just kinda stands there, mesmerized in a way he can’t fucking explain in actual words. Barney snaps to something like attention, his spine straightening and his fingers curling into nervous fists at his sides. He’s clean-shaven, his hair’s trimmed and wind-mussed, and he looks—

Clint can’t deny it: he looks good. Healthy, bright-eyed, _solid_. His lips twitch into a nervous almost-smile, he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and the longer Clint watches, the harder it is to swallow around the thickness that’s gumming up the back of his throat.

“So, uh, I know I said I wasn’t gonna come,” Barney finally says, his fingers twitching a little as he crosses the tiny room. “I mean, I wasn’t. Not like I had the money, and with Ally, and work, and everything, it just—” He shakes his head a little, and Clint works hard just to keep breathing. “But Phil, he called me. Said that shit like this matters to you a lot more than you’ll ever say. And when I explained the whole money-and-time thing, he talked some sense into Ally. Spotted me cash for the ticket. Set me up for this, as a gift to you or something.”

“Barney—”

“Hey, no, lemme finish,” Barney cuts him off, and Clint rolls his lips together. Silence sweeps over them for a second before Barney huffs out a breath and cards fingers through his hair. “I know you’re pissed at me about screwing up my probation thing,” he continues. “I’m fuckin’ pissed at myself. And we can hash that out later, if you wanna, ‘cause I deserve it. But this is your wedding, and if you’re good with me being here, I want to.” He clears his throat a little before he meets Clint’s eyes. “If you’re not too pissed to deal with my ugly mug, I mean.”

Clint nods roughly. When he sucks in a breath, he swears his whole body shakes. “Barn?” he finally manages, his voice like a whisper.

Barney swallows audibly. “Yeah?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Barney laughs wetly when Clint grabs him by the arm, but suddenly they’re colliding, Clint’s arms wrapping hard enough around his asshole older brother that he thinks for a second he might break the guy. Barney hesitates for half a second before he returns the favor, his fingers digging into Clint’s t-shirt. Clint knows that there’re tears clinging to his eyelashes, maybe even sliding down his face, but he gives exactly zero fucks about the whole thing.

“You’re an asshole,” he mutters, the words mostly lost against Barney’s shoulder. Barney snorts the kinda laugh that sounds mostly like a sniffle. “Thinking I wouldn’t want my own brother at my wedding, you’re a walking human disaster, I swear to _god_ —”

“Takes one to know one,” Barney retorts. When Clint shoves him, hard and playful, his grin’s like the fucking sun.

An hour later, while Wade and Barney are trading cell phone numbers (a terrifying thought except for the part where Barney actually needs a decent lawyer in his corner), Clint catches a flash of black and red in the corner of the full-length mirror. He stops adjusting his cufflinks to raise his eyebrows. “What?”

“You see the irony in this, don’t you?” Natasha asks, and he frowns. “Phil sends you your brother as a wedding gift, you send Phil—”

Clint rolls his eyes. “If you’re turning this into some kinda screwed-up ‘Gift of the Magi’ life-lesson, I’m calling in the second-string groomspeople.”

She cocks her head at him. “Who else at this wedding likes you enough to stand up with you?” 

He scowls. “I’m sure there’s _somebody_. Darcy, maybe?”

“Not on your life,” Natasha returns, and she laughs when he wrinkles his nose. “And no, I don’t think it’s a life-lesson out of an O. Henry story, though I’m impressed you know the reference.”

“I’ve got Darcy on speed-dial, you know,” Clint threatens. Natasha smiles, her eyes glinting, and he stops messing with his cuff to glance at her. “And if it’s not a life-lesson, then what is it?”

“Proof that you really are meant to be together,” she says, and squeezes his wrist before she walks away.

He stands there for a long time, staring at his brother and his friends as they crowd together on the dressing room’s tiny, threadbare couch, before he finally fishes his cell phone out of his pocket.

_i love you_ , he types, even though his hands are weirdly shaky.

The response buzzes through almost immediately. 

**Phil Coulson:** _I love you too, and I’ll tell you in person in an hour._

 

==

 

Phil counts it as a point of pride that he’s never once cried at a wedding.

He can’t count all the weddings he’s attended without removing his shoes and socks _and_ borrowing another person’s hands, but the fact of the matter is that weddings just don’t bring him to tears. Once, at one of his sisters’ weddings—either Jenny’s or Sam’s, but the two sort of jumble together in the memory—Amy’d elbowed him hard in the ribs as they’d walked down the church’s center aisle.

“Show some human emotion,” she’d hissed.

He’d frowned. “I’m not going to cry when I’m happy.”

She’d purposely stomped on his toe on her way to join the other bridesmaids. 

He’s not tearful now, either, although his palms are sweaty and fingers trembling as he stands out in the foyer with his parents and sisters. Natasha’s supposed to bring Clint out to him in a few minutes, allow them a tiny moment of privacy before they head out to their actual wedding, but right now, Phil can’t really focus on that. No, he’s too busy focusing on the erratic pounding of his heart, the tight feeling in his chest, the thickness in the back of his throat. His stomach swims when he breathes too deeply, and for the first time in his whole life, he thinks he might vomit on his own shoes.

“You’re turning green,” Maria says as she readjusts her dress for the tenth time in the last half-hour.

“Sorry I skipped the ill-advised marriage and divorce after college,” he shoots right back, and he actually manages a grin when she flips him off. 

He carries the smile with him as he wanders away from his friend and gaggle of sisters (all of them working to coax Clara into her flower girl shoes, which she apparently hates with a single-minded passion) and moves to stand in front of the windows. Outside, the sun glints off the snow until it’s almost blinding, a world of white that stretches far, far over the horizon. The stretch of bare land behind the hall’s actually the local high school’s practice fields, but the long shadows from the field goal posts are a poor match for the harsh glare of the winter sun. For a moment, Phil imagines that he’s living in a bitter wasteland, waiting for Clint—still his partner from his mundane life, certainly, but also a bastion of hope in a terrifying post-apocalyptic world—to rescue him from the emptiness.

He thinks maybe he’s read a few too many zombie novels in the last couple months.

“You know, ten minutes before I got married, I felt just as terrified as you _look_ ,” a familiar voice remarks, and Phil resists his urge to roll his eyes at Tony Stark’s hazy reflection. He’s not sure when Tony showed up, exactly, but then again, the parking lot’s out back behind the building, and he knows Joe and Alec are out in the snow, directing traffic.

Either way, he snorts and shakes his head. “At least Clint knows he’s getting married today.”

“Trust me, I could’ve sky-written my proposal to the big guy and I still would’ve wanted to throw up all over my shoes in that courtroom.” Tony steps close enough that their shoulders almost brush, and Phil rolls his lips into a tight line. “First day of the rest of your life’s bound to be a scary proposition, whether you’ve planned for weeks, or months, or—”

“The first day of the rest of my life started when I met Clint,” Phil cuts in. Surprise flickers across Tony’s face, and Phil frowns as he glances over. “What?”

“I forget sometimes that you care about things other than judicial economy and the administration of justice.”

This time, Phil actually rolls his eyes. “I know you spent the first six months in our office thinking my first name was ‘Chief Assistant District Attorney,’ but cut me a _little_ slack on my wedding day.” Tony snorts, complete with a little head toss, and Phil— Phil wets his lips. “I’m not sure I expected we’d get married,” he says after a few seconds, his gaze drifting back out the window. “I’m not sure I even expected that Clint’d fall for me the way I fell for him, not when I tend to be, as you so desperately like to remind me, serious to the point of boring. But somehow, I knew that he’d change my life.” He slides his hands into his pockets to keep them from trembling. “I’m just grateful he’s stuck around this long. That he’s content to keep changing it.”

“Pretty sure it’s a party foul to choke up your husband _before_ he’s your husband,” somebody responds, and Phil whips around so quickly that he almost loses his balance. Standing almost directly behind him, his tuxedo perfect and his hair only slightly out of place, is Clint. Clint, whose eyes shine brighter than the sun and whose laugh lines bunch when he grins like the cat who caught every canary in the upper Midwest. Clint, who shows his nervousness by shaking out his sleeve slightly, his cufflinks glinting in the sunlight that reflects in through the window.

A quick glance around the foyer reveals that they’re almost entirely alone, and that Phil’s mother is standing guard in the doorway that leads into the hall.

Meaning there are no witnesses when Phil surges forward and grips Clint like he’s the last solid thing on earth.

They fall together, colliding so hard that Clint releases a shaky huff of breath. He smells like wind, rain, and coffee, and Phil burrows his face into the skin of his neck. He wants to hold onto him forever, to cling to him like a lifeline until all the tension finally seeps out of his veins; from the way shaky, blunt fingers thread through the back of his hair, he suspects Clint’s thinking the exact same thing.

“About your suggestion that we elope,” he murmurs close to Clint’s ear, and Clint laughs breathlessly at his stupid, uneven joke. “I hear Tahiti’s nice this time of year. Warm. Full of drinks with tiny umbrellas.”

Clint hums in thought. “I do like you shirtless . . . ”

“I can do shirtless,” Phil offers, and Clint laughs again. It’s a soothing, welcome sound, one that chases the tension out of Phil’s belly. It grounds him, rooting him not only to the floor but to the _moment_ , and when he finally steps back from the hug, he’s smiling. Smiling and cupping Clint’s face with a hand, studying him in the sunlight and discovering all over again that, yes, the man he’s in love with is both remarkable _and_ beautiful.

“I love you,” he says, a promise from their text-message conversation earlier that afternoon.

“You make me cry before the wedding, and I’m taking Nat on our honeymoon,” Clint threatens, but his lingering smile threatens to light Phil’s heart on fire.

Phil carries the flames of that fire with him as he and Clint tangle their fingers together in the foyer, and again as they step out into the hall to join their respective groomspeople at the head of the aisle. He spends a few seconds attempting to memorize every little detail—the lights and candles that fill the hall with a white-gold glow, the smiles and tiny waves from their loved ones in the rows of seats, the quiet hum of the string quartet tuning up—but he realizes belatedly that he’s too overwhelmed, too in _awe_ of this day to piece it all together. Instead, he focuses on the heat of Clint’s palm against his, on the swell and sweep of the music, on the spark of untempered joy that twists and turns in the pit of his stomach.

There’s a whole world ebbing and flowing around them, but in those first seconds, Clint’s the constant, the one fixed point in a universe that never stops spiraling around them.

The second he realizes that, his hands stop trembling.

The officiant’s an old friend of the family, a man Phil called ‘uncle’ for the first ten or so years of his life, and he immediately launches into a free, easy speech about Coulson children and the partners they choose. The jokes feel natural, and Clint’s laugh carries over all the other voices in the hall, the soundtrack to a day that Phil won’t soon forget. 

He’s still holding Clint’s hands, still entirely wrapped up in Clint’s smile and his presence, when the officiant says, “A few weeks ago, Clint sent me an e-mail. It was the first time we’d really talked without Phil also on the phone, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t immediately taken by exactly how obviously and _loudly_ Clint loved his fiancé.” 

The crowd chuckles at the joke, but Phil— Something unfamiliar pools in Phil’s stomach, an uncertainty that climbs up and settles in the back of his throat. Clint ducks his head, the tips of his ears flaring red. 

“We e-mailed back and forth for quite a while,” the officiant continues, “talking about Phil and how much Clint wanted to do something special for him today. Something he’d remember, quote, ‘even when he’s old enough that he can’t remember the rest of the wedding.’” Standing just behind Clint, Natasha rolls her eyes, and the rest of their wedding party stifles obvious laughter. Clint just keeps on staring at the floor. “Who was I,” the officiant continues, “to say no to that?”

Phil swallows roughly, his heart and stomach both twisting into knots. Across from him, Clint raises his head, his expression suddenly serious. For a split second, Phil expects Clint to meet his gaze, but instead, he glances over Phil’s shoulder.

Glances, hesitates for one split second, and then, very slowly, nods.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” a dark, strong voice rings out, and Phil almost trips off the dais as he twists around to discover Nick Fury standing between Maria and Amy. He’s in a dark suit and tie and holding a battered, hardback book that Phil recognizes the book of sonnets he’d bought as a lovelorn college student two decades earlier. The thick feeling in Phil’s throat magnifies, doubling and tripling as Nick—his boss, his friend, the man who literally changed his life by inviting him to move to Suffolk County and join the district attorney’s office—raises his eye from the page in front of him and _smiles_. “Love is not love,” he recites, words Phil knows as certainly as his own heartbeat, “which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove. Oh, no, it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

Clint squeezes Phil’s hand, a gentle tug that pulls him back into reality, and when he turns back in Clint’s direction, he’s rewarded with the world’s most beautiful smile. It’s a smile that almost knocks him off his feet, one that’s as private as it is stunning, and Phil’s next breath trembles in his chest. He swallows around it, and around the damp that suddenly stings his eyes, but Clint just keeps smiling.

In that moment, Phil knows that he’ll never love anyone else the way he loves Clint Barton.

“Love’s not Time’s fool,” Nick continues, the room narrowing until Phil’s aware of nothing more than Nick’s voice and Clint’s breathtaking smile, “though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

When the first tear, completely uninvited, slips down Phil’s cheek, he raises his hand to swipe at it, to destroy the evidence before it’s too obvious. When the second follows, Clint releases his hands just long enough to dig into his pocket and offer Phil a tissue.

“Brought ‘em just in case,” he murmurs, and his tiny, secret wink causes Phil to release a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“If this be error,” Nick presses, the words echoing through the hall, “and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

In the immediate, half-deafening silence that follows, Phil somehow manages to steady his shuddering breaths and dry his eyes. He finds Clint’s fingers again, squeezing them until he’s certain he can stand on his own.

Clint’s mouth twitches uncertainly. “I guess you liked?” he asks quietly.

Phil’s jaw clenches like he just might start crying all over again. “ _You_ are my ever-fixed mark,” he says, and Clint’s grin just proves that he’s Phil’s one and only North Star.

 

==

 

“You’re still a horrible dancer,” Natasha informs Clint a few hours later, her bare feet gliding across the lacquered wooden dance floor. “I think Amy, Hope, and Beth are all out-dancing you, and they’re children.”

“Easy for the literal ballerina to say,” Clint grumbles, and she laughs as he stumbles to keep up with her. 

The whole hall’s filled to bursting with light and sound, a scene that’s so much like something out of a movie that Clint kinda wants to stop dancing just long enough to pinch himself and double-check he’s not dreaming. The band—no longer a string quartet as much as a clump of local college-aged kids with fast fingers and voices that belong on one of Phil’s favorite reality TV shows—strum their guitars and croon into their microphones as Clint’s friends and, yeah, his _family_ fill the dance floor and the tables beyond. He tries not to think too hard about that second bit, but his eyes keep drifting to his wedding ring, a tiny gold circle that reminds him again and again that he’s part of Phil’s family now.

Through all the good and the bad, he’d recited a couple hours earlier, and his heart races when he remembers the way Phil’s voice shook when he’d repeated the exact same line. In the hard times and the happy ones. Until death tears them apart.

His breath catches, and Natasha presses her thumb to the side of his neck. Her face practically glows when she smiles. “I’m starting to think I should pass you off to the man of the hour,” she half-teases.

Clint rolls his eyes. “I think the man of the hour’s kinda busy with his own dance partner,” he retorts, and Natasha squeaks in surprise when Clint dips her.

A couple feet away, Phil laughs, his crow’s feet bunching as he nods in Clint and Natasha’s direction. Melinda May, resplendent in a shimmering silver dress, snorts—at least, ‘til Phil raises his eyebrows. He yelps a little when she smacks him in the arm.

“Not on your life, Phil,” she warns.

Phil blinks at her, his face full of hurt. “But at your wedding—”

“You nearly dropped me on my head,” she fires back. Natasha presses her lips together to keep from laughing, but Clint can’t help his grin. Melinda jabs her finger in Clint’s direction. “I’ll forward you my hospital bills.”

Clint raises his hand from Natasha’s hip. “I’m not responsible for my husband’s poor choices,” he defends. “My bank account can’t handle them all.”

The tips of Phil’s ears burn red at the mention of the word _husband_ , but he still rolls his eyes. “And after I reminded you how much I like that dress,” he complains to Melinda, and she laughs as she leads him away.

Natasha cocks her head to one side. “We might do better if you let me lead,” she suggests.

“Or you could just suspend your creepy Russian gracefulness for five minutes,” Clint returns, and she snorts at him as they settle back into their dance.

The music stays just slow enough to dance to, and when Clint relinquishes Natasha to Bruce’s waiting arms, Phil’s sister Jenny slides right into place. He falls into easy conversation with her, and again with Darcy (who steps on his toes three times) and Peggy (whose easy grace puts even Natasha to shame), but every time, his attention drifts back to Phil. Phil, who’s loosened his tie and shed his tuxedo jacket, his sleeves rolled up to bare those beautiful forearms. Phil, who laughs at his dance partners’ jokes, his smile a light source that warms Clint all the way down to the soles of his feet. Phil, who glides along the floor with Pepper, or his sisters, or Natasha, his wedding band glinting in the light and reminding everybody that—

“You’re actually worse than him,” Clint’s dance partner comments, and he jerks his attention away from Phil just as Maria wrinkles her nose at him. “Credit where credit is due, I never expected you to be as ‘lovesick puppy dog’ about this whole affair as Phil.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “What, did you think I just wanted the tax benefits and the mortgage?”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” she replies. There’s a sudden, almost unfamiliar softness in her tone, and Clint presses his lips into a tight line as she shakes her head. “Phil loves like a dying man,” she says quietly. “Once he breaches that threshold and he’s actually in love? He pours all of his energy and heart—all of his _soul_ —into it. He devotes himself, whole-cloth.” Clint’s heart drops into his stomach, but he nods slightly. “Not everyone loves like that. Even when they’re just as serious about it, just as ready for the commitment, not everyone can be like Phil.”

The corner of his mouth twists involuntarily. “Phil’s a one-in-a-million kinda guy,” he jokes flatly.

“Maybe,” Maria replies with a shrug. “But when it comes to loving each other? I think you’re two peas in a very specific pod.”

“Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t just marry him because of how he looks in a suit,” Phil says from somewhere over Clint’s shoulder, and when Maria steps away, it’s because Phil’s slotting right into Clint’s grip.

The music slows, right about then, and in some distant corner of his mind, Clint’s vaguely aware that the band member who’s serving as the unofficial master of ceremonies is encouraging all the other couples to the dance floor. For a couple seconds, Clint tries to focus on the friends who gather around them—Bruce and Tony, Natasha and Pepper, Fury and Melinda, Wade and Nate (who are physically pushed onto the dance floor by Nate’s daughter Hope)—but in the end, the whole of Clint’s attention settles on Phil. They move together like two cogs in the same machine, the space between them disappearing as Clint slides his fingers into the back of Phil’s hair and Phil circles his arms all the way around Clint’s waist. They transform slowly into teenagers at prom, swaying together more than actually dancing, and Clint closes his eyes as he presses his temple against Phil’s.

When Phil smiles against his ear, he swears he feels it warmth coursing through his veins. “Tired of dancing with everyone else?” he teases.

Clint snorts a little half-laugh and tugs Phil closer. “Can’t I miss my guy a little?”

“Pretty sure you’re stuck with me for the rest of your life, now.”

“Still doesn’t mean I can’t miss you,” Clint returns, and he spends a few seconds studying Phil’s face—his soft eyes, his fine lines, his smile—before he leans in for a kiss.

They leave the dance floor after the couples’ dance is officially finished, and Phil tangles his fingers in Clint’s as they start wandering around from table to table, visiting with the rest of their guests. At one table, Phil’s old boss at the ethics commission—the terrifying, sharp-eyed Abigail Brand—regales Clint and a handful of others with stories that leave them all laughing uproariously, and Clint’s stomach hurts for ten minutes afterwards; at another, Clint plays a round of Go Fish with Beth Fury, Hope Summers, and Amy Jimenez while Phil charms a bunch of the teenage boys.

“I’m going to get married in a secret place,” Alex Fury volunteers at one point. “Like a jungle. Somewhere that nobody but me and my wife know about, so it’s a surprise.”

A few seats away, Beth snorts. “You’d have to find a girl who likes you first,” she says dismissively, and Clint laughs so hard that Wade, translator-and-referee, skips his turn.

“They’re going to take over the world, you know,” Wade says as the game finally ends and Amy collects her pile of victory chocolates. When Clint frowns, he gestures to the three little girls. “They’re already planning playdates for when we’re back home, and I am not totally sure I really welcome our new tiny Girl Scout overlords.”

Clint snorts. “You think they’re bad now, just wait ‘til Amy introduces Hope and Beth to Dot,” he points out, and Wade’s whole-body shudder cracks up all three of the girls. 

They end their rounds by joining Maria and her cell phone at the head table, Clint stretching his legs out in front of him while Phil loops his arm over the back of Clint’s chair. Within a couple seconds, the two chief assistant district attorneys are knee-deep in a work conversation, and Clint only resists rolling his eyes ‘cause Phil’s fingers keep tracing distracting little patterns on his shoulder. He spends his time surveying the hall instead of complaining, the familiar cadence of Phil’s work-voice in his ear as he watches a thousand tiny stories unfold in front of him. Natasha laughs at one of Pepper’s jokes while a bunch of the nieces and nephews play poker for sugar packets at one of the nearby tables; Wade and Hope slow dance while Nate pretends he’s not watching them; Stark cards his fingers through Bruce’s hair as they chat with Nick and Melinda, his body loose and relaxed for one of the first times in recorded history. Sam and Joe round up their kids for a family picture with the photographer, Barney chats idly with Darcy and Peter, and Clint—

Clint feels for a moment like his heart might burst, but in the best way possible.

When he shifts his weight around to rest his head on Phil’s shoulder, Phil stops in the middle of a sentence. “I have too many post-reception plans for you to be this tired,” he says dryly.

Maria scowls. “Because that’s not disturbing.”

Phil shrugs. “I’ve heard honesty is the best policy in a marriage,” he replies lightly, and Maria pretends she’s not smiling as she reaches for her water glass.

Clint smiles, too, and leans in to kiss the side of Phil’s neck. “Just enjoying myself,” he replies, and the fondness in Phil’s gaze feels like a whole new kind of promise.

 

==

 

The next morning, Phil wakes up to sunlight streaming in through the drapes of their hotel suite.

The spun-gold light blankets every inch of the room, and on the other side of the bed, Clint’s tanned skin glows like it’s radiating actual heat. His long eyelashes flutter slightly as he fights against the very edges of a dream, and Phil— Phil can’t help running his fingers through Clint’s sandy hair. 

Clint hums and stretches, arching like a cat into the contact, and Phil props himself up just far enough to plant a kiss on his jaw. Except one kiss turns to two and then to five, wandering pecks that trail all the way up to the corner of Clint’s mouth.

Clint’s lips curve into a sleepy smile as he finally opens his eyes. He’s groggy but gorgeous, and when he reaches to cup Phil’s face, it’s with his left hand.

Phil’s heart flutters when he catches a glimpse of his wedding ring, but he keeps that to himself. Instead, he smoothes his thumb along the curve of Clint’s ear and says, “Morning, husband.”

Clint groans and shifts to hide his face in Phil’s shoulder. “Mmm, maybe after coffee,” he murmurs, and Phil starts the first day of the rest of his life with a breathless, joyful laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks from today, we will embark on a new journey: Harmless Error, the story of Maria Hill, Jasper Sitwell, and the almost-year that changes their lives. I hope you'll stick around for this new adventure, because I'm certainly excited to share it, and it definitely starts with a bang.
> 
> Otherwise, thank you all for being part of the continued Motion Practice shenanigans, and Happy New Year!


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